Government Executive - Authors - Tim Fernholz

Watch SpaceX Bring Research, Mouse Food, And Some Unexpected Gas To The ISS

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 15:52:37 -0500

Elon Musk’s SpaceX will mount a resupply mission to the International Space Station today (Dec. 5), following a one-day delay due to moldy mouse food. (The ISS has mice onboard for research experiments.)

The launch from Cape Canaveral will use a new Falcon 9 booster, and the company will attempt to land the rocket back on a landing pad after sending the Dragon spacecraft on its way to the ISS. The Dragon is also reusable and has been to the station once before, in 2017.

SpaceX’s reusable spacecraft have helped it offer better prices to NASA and other customers.

The Dragon will carry 5,600 lbs (2,540 kg) of food, water, and experiments to the station. It will also bring a laser sensor, called the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, that NASA will use to measure plant biomass on Earth and track the affect of deforestation on climate change.

Today’s launch comes after a new report that gas from company’s spacecraft may be contaminating research sensors outside the space station as materials in the spacecraft—likely its coat of paint—release chemicals due to the heat from the sun, which can reach 250°F (121°C) at the ISS. Still, the researchers using the sensor say it hasn’t affected their work.

This is SpaceX’s 20th mission in 2018, which would beat the record the company set on Dec. 3 for most missions in a year by a private company. In 2018, SpaceX rockets will fly to orbit more often than any but those made by the Chinese government.

SpaceX is hoping to fly more than just cargo to the International Space Station: Next year, Musk’s team is hoping to fly astronauts to the station, becoming the first private company to carry humans into orbit. Their first milestone is an uncrewed flight test scheduled for Jan. 17.

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NASA Will Hire Private Companies To Hunt Water On The Moon

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 10:47:03 -0500

The U.S. space agency is kicking off a $2.6 billion push to hire private companies to ferry scientific instruments to the Moon.

NASA administrator James Bridenstine announced nine companiesthat will be able to bid on NASA contracts to search the Moon for water, hydrogen, and other resources, laying the ground work for a potential human return. The last time a person walked on the Moon was in 1972.

NASA did not explain why the companies were selected, or how funding will be allotted between them for flights that could begin as soon as the end of 2019.

“What should decide on the success and viability of each one of those partners should be how they deliver the services we want,” Thomas Zurbuchen, who leads NASA’s science directorate, said today. “We did not go into very deep background, the technical background; frankly, that is going to come next.”

The decision comes after NASA cancelled a $100 million project to build its own prospecting lunar rover. Instead, the agency will use the public-private partnership model that successfully developed SpaceXand Northrop Grumman rockets to bring cargo to the International Space Station, and that it is pursuing with SpaceX and Boeing to fly astronauts next year.

Bridenstine and the Trump administration more broadly have pushed to expand the new model of buying services, not hardware, from private companies. Yet the $2.6 billion budget for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program is tiny compared the $12 billion (pdf) the agency is paying Boeing for a traditional heavy rocket called the Space Launch System, which may fly humans into deep space sometime after 2020.

The mounting delays in launching that mission contributed to the need for the services program.

“We need to do science on the surface of the Moon, but NASA has focused the Moon within the human exploration directorate,” Bridenstine said. This new program will come under NASA’s science directorate, led by Zurbuchen, a Swiss-American physicist.

“The Moon is full of secrets,” Zurbuchen said. “There are parts of the Moon, especially when the sun and the Earth are on the same side of the Moon, it’s so quiet there that we can see all the way back to the dawn of the universe, in a way that we can’t do anywhere else, not even on satellites. On the Moon, there is water…and we want to learn how to use those resources, because we want to go back with humans.”

NASA’s partner companies for the new program range in size from veteran contractors like Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which built the lander NASA deposited on Mars this week, to brand-new consortiums like Orbit Beyond, which was incorporated in September to participate in this program. Draper, an aerospace consultancy, and engineering firms like Deep Space Systems and Intuitive Machines have made advanced components for NASA projects in the past.

Two of the companies, Astrobotic and Moon Express, are explicitly focused on the business of sending robots to the Moon, with Astrobotic already scheduled to launch its own mission next year. Masten Space Systems and Firefly Aerospace, the last two participants, are focused on building launch vehicles but neither has launched anything into space.

Neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin, the space companies led by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos respectively, are participating in the program. Both companies, however, have lunar ambitions, with SpaceX planning a tourist trip around our natural satellite sometime in the mid-2020s, while Blue Origin has announced a plan to develop its own Moon lander.

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The U.S. Now Suspects Russian Microwaves Caused Diplomats’ Brain Injuries

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 09:32:35 -0400

U.S. diplomats and spies who suffered mysterious brain injuries in Cuba and China have seen many explanations for their problems: Sound weapons. Mass psychosis. Cicadas. Ultrasonic microphones.

And now, according to recent reports, microwave weapons operated by Russian agents.

In 2016, U.S. embassy workers in Cuba reported hearing chirping sounds before suffering headaches, memory and hearing loss, and difficulty sleeping. Physicians documented brain injuries in the victims, though these results have been questioned by other researchers. Similar symptoms were experienced by an embassy worker in Guangzhou, China, this year.

The New York Times reported on Sept. 1 that some physicians examining the diplomats, along with some government scientists, believe the injuries could have been caused by an attack with microwave energy. Under certain conditions, humans exposed to microwave energy report hearing audible sounds and suffering symptoms consistent with those reported by the diplomats.

At least one researcher isn’t convinced: University of Pennsylvania professor Kenneth Foster criticized the theory, writing that microwave energy sufficient to damage the human brain “would have to be so intense they would actually burn the subject.” He argued in favor of another theory proposed by a University of Michigan researcher, who was able to replicate sounds reportedly recorded by the victims, using interference generated between ultrasonic transmitters.

Such interference might be caused by electronic surveillance from outside an embassy interacting with jamming devices inside.

Today, NBC reported that officials suspect Russian agents are behind the incidents, though they are unable to confirm how or why. Government researchers are reportedly experimenting to determine if a microwave transmitter could have been used to induce the reactions alone or in combination with some other technology.

Russia competes with the U.S. for influence in Cuba, and has been a major beneficiary of president Donald Trump’s skeptical policy toward Havana. The health problems at the embassy are often cited by opponents of normalizing relations as evidence of Cuba’s bad faith.

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A Tiny Hole in the Soyuz Spacecraft Could Be a Huge Headache for NASA

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 12:36:19 -0400

Flight controllers monitoring the International Space Station’s atmosphere detected a steady but small drop in pressure on Aug. 29. At the time, the six astronauts onboard were sleeping. Controllers didn’t wake them up right away—the station wouldn’t have run out of air for 18 days.

Once awake, the astronauts discovered a 2-millimeter hole inside the Soyuz spacecraft, which ferried the most recent expedition some 250 miles (402 km) up to the station in June. (Naturally, the hole was behind the toilet.) At first, the cause was assumed to be a micrometeoroid or other space debris, the bane of human spaceflight in low-earth orbit.

But the breach appears to have been caused by the errant drill of a Russian manufacturing technician, which skittered across the surface of the spacecraft. These types of quality control problems with the Soyuz—the only way for astronauts to get to ISS—will pile more pressure on the delayed efforts of Boeing and SpaceX to fly astronauts for NASA.

ISS Leak summary:

First thought was MMOD strike.

Then NASA released pics. Lots of people: "Hmmm, doesn't look like MMOD". NASA deleted the photos.

Top Russian news site RIA NOVOSTI reported - via sources but apparently confirmed by Mr. Rogozin - it was a drill hole. pic.twitter.com/520kHK0TMc
— Chris B - NSF (@NASASpaceflight) September 3, 2018

Instead of reporting the problem—which could have required a costly and time-consuming re-build—the technician apparently covered the hole with a patch, which ultimately gave way.

Cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev was able to re-patch the hole with gauze and epoxy, an effective temporary solution. Luckily, the breach is located in a section of the spacecraft that is jettisoned before it returns to earth—had it been in the segment where astronauts sit, the situation would be much more serious.

Dmitry Rogozin, the burly and aggressive head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, is a target of U.S. sanctions even as he now shepherds U.S. astronauts into orbit. Rogozin has promised to get to the bottom of the issue. “Now it is essential to see the reason, to learn the name of the one responsible for that,” he said. “And we will find out, without fail.”

Ups and Downs

“Despite the incredible capability and robust designs, Russian space technology production always suffered from quality problems,” Mark Albrecht, a longtime U.S. government space policymaker and former executive of a Lockheed Martin partnership, told me in 2017. That was during a discussion of the Proton rocket, built by a different company; the Soyuz has a longstanding record of reliability, with no failures in 90 flights since 1983.

An investigation into the Soyuz hole will include a careful examination of the assembly of that spacecraft to ensure it can still carry astronauts down in October, as well as the spacecraft launching a new crew of two Russians and one American shortly thereafter. If problems are suspected with either spacecraft, it may force some or all of the ISS crew to return to earth prematurely, because the station must maintain a reliable “lifeboat” for all six of its passengers.

With the U.S. still at least nine months from being able to fly more astronauts to the station itself using new spacecraft built by SpaceX and Boeing, the future of the station remains in the hands of the Russians and the Soyuz. “Our Russian partners have demonstrated their human and technological resilience many times throughout the history of their efforts in human spaceflight,” a NASA spokesperson told Quartz. “The International Space Station partners all participate in multiple reviews prior to every major station activity to assess and ensure the safety of all crew members.”

Even without errant drill holes, astronauts are facing challenges getting to orbit. In July, government auditors warned that SpaceX and Boeing were in danger of running out of time before a Soyuz flight scheduled for November 2019, the last with Americans onboard. NASA executives managed to push that flight to January 2020, and are also considering using test flights of the new vehicles in 2019 to carry additional astronauts to the station for long-term missions. But if delays continue to mount, it could leave the U.S. locked out of the station for months.

Cabin Crew

NASA officials told the auditors that the ISS can’t function without astronauts onboard. That’s largely because the $150 billion station’s function is to keep humans alive so they can perform research projects. Kevin Metrocavage, a NASA operations manager for the ISS, describes the station as both a complex vehicle like an airplane, and a home.

“You’re changing out batteries in your smoke detectors, you’re changing out hardware, they’ve got filters…changing out toilet hardware, something that needs to be kept sterile and handled on a regular basis,” Metrocavage told Quartz. “Trouble-shooting anomalies is inevitable; we have hardware failures and leaks.”

But when it comes to maintaining the station’s position in space, “really mostly everything can be done from the ground,” he says. “We want to the crew to focus on the research.”

The real problem with an empty or under-crewed station isn’t that it might fall out of the sky, but that it would be a colossal waste. As it is, ISS astronauts are heavily scheduled, acting as lab technicians for research projects (which often include themselves), exercising to maintain their health, fixing and maintaining the station, installing new hardware, and squeezing in sleep and personal time when they can.

The vehicles being designed by SpaceX and Boeing are extremely welcome at NASA in part because they promise the ability to keep four U.S. astronauts on station at a time instead of just three, expanding the amount of work that can be done on station.

So if the U.S. astronauts are missing for any period of time, can the cosmonauts handle their tasks alone? “I think it would be tough for us operate without them or for them to operate without us without more extensive training,” Metrocavage says. “Hopefully that’s never a question we have to answer.”

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How The Space Force Took Over Washington

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 16:17:10 -0400

With soldiers still fighting in the Middle East after 17 years, the White House obsession with creating a “Space Force” may seem odd. But in a speech at the Pentagon today, vice president Mike Pence confirmed that the administration plans to do just that. It’s a decision that, however bizarrely timed, is being driven by a potent mix of national security concerns, space spectacle, and pork-barrel spending.

Space is vital to U.S. national security and military power, even if very little of what you might consider “warfighting” goes on there now. America’s orbiting military computers are an incredible asset, providing communications and surveillance on a scale that its adversaries can’t rival (to say nothing of how important they are to the US economy).

What’s protecting those orbital computers is mostly that they are tens of thousands of miles above the earth, orbiting at nearly two miles per second. But that’s not the comfort it used to be. Russia and China are demonstrating increasing abilities to get to space and take military action there, as a broader technological revolution makes it easier for small organizations of all kinds to disrupt space. On earth, jamming techniques used by countries like Iran are growing more sophisticated, while the maturing weapons program in North Korea requires new surveillance tools to protect Americans.

A number of lawmakers, particularly Alabama representative Mike Rogers, have been pushing for the military to do more in space. In response, the Air Force, currently responsible for most space missions, revamped its command structures. But these lawmakers want a dedicated military branch focused on space, an organization that would also be well positioned to pour money into the coffers of defense contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and SpaceX.

While the military, and particularly Air Force leaders, have resisted a more massive re-organization, the notion of a Space Force did capture the imagination of president Donald Trump. At a June event focused on shifting more space resources into civilian hands, Trump suddenly ordered the creation of a new, separate branch of the military. More recently, his supporters have started chanting “Space Force” at rallies.

It’s not that simple. One key problem is that this expensive decision will require congressional approval, which is why on Thursday, Pence announced everything but the creation of an independent space force. There will be a new space command, led by an Air Force general; a new space operations force, made up of a select group of the thousands of U..S military personnel and contractors already working on space issues; and a space development agency to help with the military’s primary mission in space: buying expensive space hardware from private companies.

Then, Pence says, the administration will push Congress to create an independent Department of the Space Force within the Pentagon by 2020. Whether lawmakers take the White House up on this remains to be seen, especially if partisan control of Congress changes hands in this fall’s election.

Trump’s Space Force also rests on the premise, largely false, that the U.S. lacks military power in space. “Our adversaries have transformed space into a war-fighting domain already, and the United States will not shrink from this challenge,” Pence said today. In reality, the US military has demonstrated anti-satellite weapons since the 1960s and as recently as 2008. The U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s and early 1990s was probably the largest military space effort in history. What’s different now is that potential adversaries are catching up to US capabilities, leading Pentagon strategists to search for new advantages.

It’s important to understand that the Space Force, at least at first, is an exercise in re-naming and re-organizing existing military space commands. NASA and its plans to fly astronauts next year are not part of the Space Force, and the Space Force will not be putting weapons in space yet because the U.S. doesn’t have any (publicly known) weapons that it could put there.

But increasing fears about North Korean nuclear weapons and Chinese hypersonic missiles have defense officials like Michael Griffin, a former director of SDI and administrator of NASA, considering the merits of a new constellation of threat-detecting satellites in space. That’s also important to understand: When you imagine a generation of space warfighters, don’t think of a Space Shuttle with lasers. Instead, picture a control room full of talented engineers, driving sophisticated orbital computers to watch over their enemies.

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Trump Is Hiding His Phone Calls To World Leaders From The Public

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 10:02:00 -0400

The White House will no longer tell the public when Donald Trump speaks to foreign heads of government, CNN reported earlier this week.

In recent presidential administrations, presidential aides would typically write out a brief description of the call. As you can see from this 2015 example, they’re not exactly overflowing with detail:

Readout of the President’s Call with Prime Minister Tsipras of Greece

President Obama spoke this morning with Prime Minister Tsipras of Greece. The President received an update from Prime Minister Tsipras on his ideas for a path forward between Greece and its creditors. The President reiterated that it is in everyone’s interest that Greece and its creditors reach a mutually-acceptable agreement.

But these sketches are vital tools of public diplomacy in a democracy. Brief as they are, they allow the president to tell his constituents who he’s speaking to and the message he’s trying to deliver.

Absent that information, the public’s only way to know what kind of diplomacy is being conducted on their behalf is through anonymous leaks, or from statements made by leaders in another country. We’ve already seen the upset that causes during the Trump presidency: Disputes over Trump’s calls have ranged from the leaked “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” incident following Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s “re-election,” to differing summaries of a call between Trump and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

These incidents could have been worse if the Trump administration had not even tried to put forth its own narrative. Consider the furor surrounding Trump’s private meeting with Putin in Helsinki last week: The White House refused to release any specifics about the conversation; even Director of National Intelligence wasn’t sure what was said. Meanwhile, the Russian government announced plans to resolve the Crimean crisis and offered to send Russian intelligence officers for questioning in exchange for U.S. citizens to be sent for interrogation in Russia.

Damage control has been necessary ever since. Without their own public version of events, Trump’s team was forced to disavow any commitment to an interrogation exchange following bipartisan outrage, and yesterday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. won’t recognize the annexation of Crimea, despite the president’s public musing that he would.

On July 23, press secretary Sarah Sanders complained that “[the press] continue to obsessively cover [the Russia story].” A reporter quickly replied, “but we can’t really [cover it] because it’s been seven days and we have not received a readout, we have not received any specific details about agreements that were reached, whether formally or verbally.”

Sanders responded that “the only specific agreement that was made was that the two national security teams from both the United States and Russia would continue at a working level.” If the White House had said that on day one, it wouldn’t have put an end to reporters’ questions—but it would have put the United States in control of the narrative instead engaging in a series of denials.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on how it will report the president’s calls with foreign leaders.

As long as silence is the policy, any foreign leader—or comedian—will be able to claim they’ve spoken to Trump and agreed, or disagreed, about any issue. It could take days or weeks for the White House to dispute inaccuracies; ultimately, the soft power of setting the international agenda is being lost by the White House.

And while it may be quaint to lament the passing of these vignettes of diplomacy, propaganda tools in their own right, there is a difference between knowing what the president wants you to believe, and knowing nothing at all.

Unless there are more tapes.

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A Toxic Fuel Leak On Boeing’s Spacecraft Will Ground U.S. Astronauts a Little Longer

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 15:55:39 -0400

Dripping toxic chemicals fouled an attempt to test the rocket engines on a Boeing spacecraft designed to replace the space shuttle and carry astronauts to the International Space Station next year.

The anomaly validates warnings that neither Boeing nor its rival SpaceX will be able to field operational spacecraft in time to maintain a steady flow of astronauts to the orbital lab next year, which NASA officials say could put the station in danger. The space agency is paying the two private companies more than $6.5 billion to develop low-cost, reliable space transportation for people.

Boeing is currently developing a space capsule called the CST-100 Starliner to fly into space on top of an Atlas V rocket booster. Spacecraft are designed to separate from their rocket booster in an emergency, allowing human passengers a chance to escape if something goes wrong.

The Starliner is equipped with four small rocket engines built by Aerojet Rocketdyne. They are mounted on the bottom of the spacecraft called the “service module” that contains the technical infrastructure to support the crew inside the capsule. In May, Boeing brought the service module to a missile-test facility, aiming to demonstrate that it could carry the astronauts away from an emergency.

It's about to get hotter in New Mexico!
The #Starliner team moved the service module onto the test stand ahead of its first @WSMissileRange hot fire test. pic.twitter.com/8xCIpzeXcH
— Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) May 23, 2018

Ars Technica first reported that something went wrong following a June test. Boeing confirmed that a fuel leak developed after a successful firing of the engines. The fuel used in these engines, hydrazine, reacts violently when exposed to certain catalysts. That allows engineers to design a fairly simple, compact engine, yet hydrazine itself is extremely toxic and volatile—the last thing you want leaking on a human-rated spacecraft.

Boeing said it believes it understands the cause of the leak and how to fix it without re-designing the entire spacecraft. When asked about the status of a full test of spacecraft’s escape ability before news of the fuel leak broke, a Boeing spokesperson said the company was “currently evaluating possible dates for the Pad Abort Test.”

As of April, NASA estimated that Boeing would be certified to fly astronauts in December 2019, a month after the last U.S. astronauts return from the International Space Station on-board a Russian spacecraft—and more than two years after Boeing’s initial target.

Before then, Boeing must fly uncrewed and crewed demonstration flights, as must SpaceX. The first crewed flight tests are scheduled for the end of the year, and most people familiar with the program expect further delays. In early August, NASA is expected to announce which of its astronauts will fly first onboard the new spacecraft.

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Donald Trump Nominated a Man With No Space Experience To Be NASA’s Second-in-Command

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 09:40:06 -0400

The White House announced today his intent to nominate James Morhard, a long-time Senate aide with no experience in space technology, to be the deputy administrator of NASA.

In doing so, Trump is passing over Dr. Janet Kavandi, an astronaut and respected leader of one of the space agency’s research centers. Kavandi was the first choice of NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, who had called for her appointment publicly.

“This Administration is committed to American leadership in space, and I look forward to working with Mr. Morhard upon his confirmation,” Bridenstine said in a statement. Morhard will need to be confirmed by a majority of the Senate before he can take up his job.

Quartz first reported that the White House was considering Morhard for the position earlier this week. Several officials familiar with the deliberations were concerned about the message that might be sent by the appointing a man with little experience in space technology after Bridenstine, a former lawmaker, was criticized for his lack of engineering experience.

Morhard, 61, is currently the deputy Senate sergeant at arms, responsible for technology and administration in the offices of 100 senators and 88 committees and subcommittees. Starting off as an accountant at the Pentagon, he began his career as a legislative staffer in 1983, earning an MBA and a law degree along the way. His time in the Senate included work on the committee that controlled NASA’s budget.

He rose to become the powerful staff director of the Appropriations Committee under the late Sen. Ted Stevens, and forged close ties with Republican senators. Morhard was a passenger, along with former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, in a 2010 plane crash that killed Stevens and four others.

“Jim Morhard is a seasoned veteran, steeped in budget [and] appropriations process in the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, and managed a critical, complex organization as Deputy Senate Sergeant at Arms that covers everything from security to fundamental business operations,” O’Keefe, who worked with Morhard while Secretary of the Navy, told Quartz. “Most of all, he’s loaded with integrity. He’s an outstanding nominee.”

Some NASA stakeholders worry that Morhard’s background as a Capitol Hill operator doesn’t balance well with Bridenstine’s similar work as a lawmaker. Previous presidents have sought to combine engineering know-how and political savvy by splitting those responsibilities roughly between the administrator and their deputy.

“Especially when the administrator is a politico like Bridenstine, the deputy should be more of a technical, chief operating officer for the agency,” says Phil Larson, a former Obama White House space adviser who is now assistant dean at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s engineering school. “It’s telling that Bridenstine was openly campaigning for someone with research and operational experience, but unfortunately, like many things this administration does, they appointed a friend of those in power who has no relevant experience.”

NASA, alongside operating the International Space Station and numerous space probes exploring the universe, is preparing to return human spaceflight to the United States for the first time since 2011. That will require the agency to sign-off on rockets built by private companies Boeing and SpaceX which will fly astronauts as a commercial service for the first time.

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NASA’s Chief Wants Former Astronaut Janet Kavandi To Help Run Things. Trump Is Looking At The Senate’s Admin Guy

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 10:03:14 -0400

How much space expertise does NASA need in its top office to launch humans safely into space?

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine is a former lawmaker, and he says he wants a former astronaut, Dr. Janet Kavandi, as his deputy. But Donald Trump, who makes the final decision, is leaning toward a man with no experience in space technology.

Five sources with knowledge of the deliberations tell Quartz that the White House is seriously considering James Morhard, a veteran senate aide. Their names have been withheld because they are not authorized to discuss the decision, but they worry that the wrong person in that job could create new problems for NASA. The agency is preparing to authorize private spacecraft built by Boeing and SpaceX to carry astronauts to the International Space Station in 2019—the first launch of astronauts from US soil since 2011.

“The President selects the highest caliber of individuals from an array of backgrounds and experiences to fill positions in his Administration,” White House spokesperson Lindsay Walters said in a statement responding to questions about the deputy NASA administrator role.

What’s the Right Resume?

During testy Senate confirmation hearings, Bridenstine reminded senators charged with approving him that previous administrators, including iconic leader James Webb, came from non-technical backgrounds. But the former lawmaker and fighter pilot promised that he would seek an experienced technologist for his leadership team if confirmed.

Presidents often balance NASA leadership between those who navigate political battles, and less partisan figures with space exploration experience. During the Obama administration, former astronaut Charles Bolden led the agency, while Lori Garver, a space expert who been a senior advisor at NASA during the Clinton administration, was his deputy. Before that, NASA administrator Michael Griffin, an aerospace engineering expert, was back-stopped by Shana Dale, an attorney who had worked in the Bush White House and Congress.

Bridenstine is seeking similar balance for his own political background: In June, he said Kavandi would make an excellent deputy administrator.“That’s the kind of person at this juncture, given how important everything is right now, that we need as our deputy, and I’m advocating for her,” Bridenstine said.

“Janet Kavandi is a lifelong space professional with high-level management experience and a strong technical background, and [Bridenstine] continues to believes she would be an excellent choice as NASA’s Deputy Administrator,” NASA press secretary Megan Powers told Quartz. “That being said, we are committed to fulfilling the President’s vision of sending humans back to the moon in a sustainable way and are looking forward to having a Deputy Administrator in place to assist with meeting that objective.”

The Astronaut and the Appropriator

Kavandi, 58, joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 1994. She had previously been an engineer at Boeing, and earned a P.h.D in analytical chemistry from the University of Washington in Seattle. She spent 33 days in space as an astronaut on three different space shuttle missions, then became the lead astronaut supervising work on the International Space Station and the deputy head of the astronaut office. In 2016, she became the director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center, which includes a huge vacuum chamber where SpaceX’s crew vehicle, the Dragon space capsule, is currently undergoing tests.

“While the President has not yet nominated a deputy administrator for the Agency, Dr. Kavandi is honored that the NASA Administrator expressed his confidence in her,” a spokesperson for Kavandi told Quartz.

Kavandi has attracted bipartisan kudos, with Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio praising Bridenstine’s choice. Ohio’s Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown told Quartz that “there’s no question Janet Kavandi is a highly qualified professional who knows the value of NASA Glenn and the importance of aerospace to the state of Ohio. She’d have my support.”

In his current job, Morhard, 61, is responsible for technology and administration in the offices of 100 senators and 88 committees and subcommittees. Starting off as an accountant at the Pentagon, he began his career as a legislative staffer in 1983, earning an MBA and a law degree along the way.

He rose to become the powerful chief of staff of the Appropriations Committee under the late senator Ted Stevens, and forged close ties with Republican senators. Morhard was a passenger, along with former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, in a 2010 plane crash that killed Stevens and four others. He did not return a message left at his office.

Morhard received his current job from Senate leader Mitch McConnell, but when asked about Morhard’s future, McConnell’s spokesperson told Quartz that “we don’t comment on administration nominations that haven’t been made.”

One NASA official who spoke about the nomination with Quartz worried that Morhard lacks sufficient engineering experience to justify his nomination alongside Bridenstine, particularly on technical questions where NASA headquarters will need to play referee between competing teams of engineers.

Tough Decisions Loom

Boeing and SpaceX are the first companies to build human-rated spacecraft as a fixed-price commercial service for NASA, rather than executing NASA designs under a cost-plus contract. As a lawmaker, Bridenstine was a major proponent of these partnerships, citing SpaceX and Orbital ATK’s successful work carrying cargo to the International Space Station.

But flying humans into space is a whole new level of danger. NASA’s engineers have pushed both companies to meet a safety threshold more than twice as high as that of the Space Shuttle. That metric, known as loss of crew, is expressed as a probability of 1 in 270; the Space Shuttle at its best had a 1 in 90 chance of loss of crew.

Despite their efforts, neither Boeing nor SpaceX appears likely to meet the standard, though they will both field vehicles considered safer than the shuttle. The biggest problem for both companies is the constant danger of micrometeoroids in orbit, though each is working to resolve specific concerns NASA engineers have with their vehicle designs.

NASA is preparing to okay flights below the targeted standard because it simply may be impossible to reach; as Kathy Leuders, the commercial crew program manager, told me last year, “you have goals, and then you have engineering reality.” NASA is doing other work to help mitigate these risks, like installing high-definition cameras on the ISS to inspect spacecraft for any problems on-orbit. Bill Gerstenmaier, the NASA executive in charge of human exploration and operations, has written eloquently about the need for NASA to acknowledge that risk is central to space exploration.

The final decision to put astronauts on these rockets will come to Bridenstine’s desk. In the past, the disconnect between headquarters decision-makers and engineers on the ground was linked to disasters like the lost Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. So the rest of NASA is watching closely to see who Bridenstine’s deputy will be.

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What Happens When Astronauts Drop Their Tools In Space

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 10:05:45 -0400

Excerpt from audio recordings of Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt during their first moonwalk in 1972:

123:42:22 Schmitt: Okay. [Pause] I didn’t mean to drop that, but I did.

123:42:31 Cernan: Yeah, we got to keep from dropping everything. I’ll tell you, the big lesson today…

123:42:35 Schmitt: [Garbled]

123:42:36 Cernan: Dust, I guess.

123:42:38 Schmitt: The big lesson is that it’s going to get dropped if your hands get tired.

Astronaut Harrison Schmitt collects samples on the moon in December 1972. (NASA/Gene Cernan)

To get a human being into space (alive) you need to wrap them in a pressurized cocoon of air so they can breathe without boiling.

Perhaps the most difficult part of spacesuit design is the glove, where engineers must create a design rigid enough to maintain pressure, yet flexible enough to bend through the full range of motion in the fingers and the wrist. Naturally, they don’t succeed—the glove used by NASA astronauts working in spacesuits today limits them to about 20% of their full range of motion, according to Ted Southern, a spacesuit designer who works with the agency.

TV carpenter Norm Abram tries out an astronaut’s glove and toolkit in 2000. (NASA)

This makes working with these gloves exhausting, and dropping stuff inevitable.

“You do almost all of your work with your hands,” says Scott Wray, who works at NASA and helps astronauts plan and execute space walks on the International Space Station. Unlike lunar expeditions, where astronauts could perambulate around on foot, today’s space workers use their hands to navigate the ISS even as they work. This can present a problem, because when you drop something in orbit, it doesn’t fall—but it can quickly drift out of reach.

“If I drop a hammer on a space walk, ninety minutes later that hammer may collide with me or the space station, causing some damage,” Wray says, referencing the time it takes the space lab to orbit the earth at more than 17,500 miles per hour. “So it’s a pretty serious deal. If [astronauts] drop something, we want them to report the mass, the velocity, the direction of travel, the dimensions of the tool… we’ve got a group here of experts who work with DOD and track those objects in orbit.”

Whatever astronauts lose control of in space becomes its own satellite. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who maintains databases of launches and satellites in orbit, has recorded the following dropped objects that have been classified as satellites.

Yes, that is a spatula in 2006. After a damaged heat shield led the Space Shuttle Columbia to break apart on re-entry, NASA experimented with ways to repair broken thermal tiles while in orbit. That included tests that simulated injecting various “goos” into the tile and spreading them with a kind of spatula. “When [Sellers] came home after the mission, he had a lot of spatulas waiting for him in his office from his astronaut co-workers,” Wray recalls.

In a June 2018 spacewalk, astronaut Drew Feustel lost a wire-tie, used to secure bundles of wires outside the station, while installing new cameras on the outside of the station.

You can see Feustel and colleague Ricky Arnold at work in this video. You can see them checking their gloves and helmets, securing wire bundles, and very carefully moving their tools across the station. (You don’t see them losing the wire-tie.)

Naturally, NASA spends a lot of time working on not dropping things. Every tool is attached to a tether that should be linked to a suit or the station at all times: Wray says astronauts learn a protocol known as “make before you break,” to remember to hook each tool down before they lose contact with it. But over the course of a six-hour spacewalk, concentration can lapse—especially when all those tethers are floating in micro-gravity and bumping into each other in your tool box.

“I also come up with the most efficient tool configuration,” Wray says. “The best way to reduce the risk of losing a tool is to reduce the number of tools on a spacewalk, but you never know if you’re going to need an extra pry bar or torque wrench in case you encounter something off-nominal.”

The good news when it comes to lost objects in low-earth orbit, about 250 miles (402 kilometers) above the earth, is that most soon drift into the atmosphere below and burn up. The most important thing is avoiding near-term damage to the space station.

“Ideally if a crew member were to drop something, we’d want it to be heading nadir—towards the earth—and in the aft direction, so its falling orbit would be lower than the space station,” Wray says. “If it went zenith, in a way, you’re sort of pushing it into a higher orbit and possibly a higher velocity, its next orbit could collide.”

Luckily, the ISS is usually equipped to boost its altitude thanks to rocket engines on the Russian module, which it does to maintain altitude and dodge orbital debris, whether created by astronauts or anyone else.

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NASA Can’t Find Most Of The Asteroids Threatening Earth, But It Has a Plan

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 10:35:52 -0400

If the movies teach us anything, it’s that the U.S. government has a small room with a few stressed-out bureaucrats worrying about every disaster that might arise. Volcanos? Absolutely. Pandemic influenza? You got it. Today, we heard from the killer asteroid team.

The bad news? NASA is not going to be able to find all the asteroids big enough to cause serious devastation on Earth by 2020—or even 2033. Also: For a hypothetical attempt to send a spacecraft to divert an seriously dangerous incoming asteroid, we’ll need a ten year heads-up to build it and get it to the asteroid.

The good news? They’re working on it. “If a real threat does arise, we are prepared to pull together the information about what options might work and provide that information to decision-makers,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer, told reporters.

The meat of the announcement today from was the conversion of a 2016 strategy document (pdf) produced by the Obama administration into a set of coordinated goals (pdf) across the government, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Department of Energy. Sensible stuff— figuring out how better to track asteroids; predict their behavior; re-route or break them apart; and work better with international partners to routinely improve the world’s ability to do this.

Even though asteroid impacts are rare, they’re serious. You might remember the 2013 impact of a meteoroid in Chelyabinsk, Russia, which exploded in the air and released enough energy to injure a thousand people, mostly due to shattered windows. It was fairly small: Just 20 or 30 meters across, which means the network of telescopes we rely on to hunt asteroids didn’t spot it before it entered Earth’s atmosphere—and probably won’t find others of that size, either.

NASA, under orders from Congress, is focused on finding asteroids bigger than 140 meters across—that is, those that are large enough to devastate an entire region. We still have a lot to do in that regard, per Johnson, who says that “we’ve found about 8,000 near-Earth asteroids at least 140 meters across, but two thirds of such objects remain to be discovered.”

The chart above shows that we’ve found most of the asteroids that could end life on Earth, but we’ve found far fewer of the smaller kind, which could still devastate life for millions of people.

Equivalent area of destruction for a Tunguska-sized asteroid over New York City. (NASA)

NASA cites the 1908 airburst of a 40 to 60 meter asteroid over Tunguska, Russia, which leveled 2,000 square kilometers of forest. If that were to happen over New York City, it would cause millions of casualties.

NASA says it would be unlikely to detect an near-Earth object of this size with more than a few days of warning. That’s why the first big action item in this report is for NASA, the Air Force and the National Science Foundation to come up with a plan to invest in new telescopes to hunt these asteroids.

The amount of funds available for Planetary Protection is increasing, with the Trump administration requesting $150 million from lawmakers next year, mostly to fund a mission to demonstrate a spacecraft called DART that could deflect an Earth-bound asteroid. But strangely, Johnson would not discuss specific technologies for hunting asteroids during the media briefing on the report.

One option is NEOCam, a proposed telescope that would hunt for asteroids. But that program may be under stress now that important questions are being raised about its predecessor project, called NEOWise. That effort used a different telescope to measure near-Earth objects, but Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft technologist with a Ph.d in physics, has challenged the results, publishing a new peer-reviewed paper arguing that they are far more uncertain than NASA’s researchers suggest.

Johnson didn’t have much to say about the controversy when asked by a reporter, saying the NEOWise data “is extensively utilized by the overall scientific community as the best data available on the population of near-Earth asteroids as we know them.”

But as the graph above shows, the best is far from good enough.

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Defense Contractors Are Helping Care for Detained Migrant Children

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 10:16:38 -0400

General Dynamics is one of the largest defense contractors in the country, a massive conglomerate that builds jets, tanks, bullets and submarines at facilities around the United States. It is also caring for the detained migrant children that the government has separated from their parents.

President Trump’s decision to separate families who are apprehended illegally crossing the U.S. border has led to a huge influx of children into the government’s custody. His chief of staff, John Kelly, has promised that “the children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.” With thousands of these children now calling for their parents from converted Wal-Marts and warehouses, the administration is under pressure to come up with “whatever” very fast.

General Dynamics also specializes in outsourcing bureaucracy. Since 2000, it has worked for the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. This entails “casework support services to help ensure special needs of unaccompanied children are met, including medical requirements, and to facilitate family reunification, only after children are under the care of Health and Human Services,” according to a statement provided by General Dynamics Information Technology spokesperson Jay Hauck.

The statement stresses that “General Dynamics Information Technology has no role in the family separation policy, nor a role in the construction or operation of detention facilities.”

With so many new children in the system, General Dynamics has begun advertising for jobs to help process all of the tiny prisoners—bilingual caseworkers, data entry clerks, someone to review files and redact information. (Turnover is going to be a problem.)

These very specific help-wanted ads have attracted notice from reporters and from activist groups Sleeping Giant and Grab Your Wallet, who have begun contacting General Dynamics and another contractor, MVM Inc., to let them “know how they feel about making money on locking children in cages.” MVM is a privately-held former CIA contractor with a checkered history that works with ORR to manage emergency shelters.

In 2017, General Dynamics made more than $4 billion on IT contracts like these, including some administering Medicare. The company would not comment on how much money it was making on its current contract, which began in 2015, or how much it might stand to make if the program expands. Reuters previously reported that the company was awarded $13 million in contracts between 2010 and 2014.

The company has also been popular on Wall Street, and a fixture in the S&P 500—which means it is also found in many people’s 401(k)s. Today, under an onslaught of bad publicity, its stock has fallen more than 2 percent.

The company may not have a role in border policy, but it does have influence in Washington. General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic, who made $21 million in total compensation last year, is a former CIA officer, and the company spent more than $11 million last year lobbying lawmakers and executive agencies.

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The 'Sonic Attack' in China May Have Been Clumsy Ultrasonic Eavesdropping, Expert Says

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Thu, 24 May 2018 15:56:55 -0400

A U.S. diplomat in China has reported unpleasant feelings of pressure and irritating sounds, reminiscent of reports of experiences in Cuba that left 21 U.S. diplomats with brain injuries last year.

“The medical indications are very similar and entirely consistent with the medical indications that have taken place to Americans working in Cuba,” secretary of state Mike Pompeo told lawmakers on May 23.

But these were likely not “sonic attacks”—instead, researchers believe the symptoms can be explained by clumsy efforts to eavesdrop on American embassies and consulates using high-tech listening devices.

In both cases, diplomats reported hearing high-pitched noises and feeling dizzy, suffering from headaches, or being unable to sleep. U.S. officials released a sample of the sound:

The Cuban episode was politically fraught, as the Trump administration used it to justify attempts to end the Obama administration’s policy of normalizing relations with Havana. Cuba blamed the noise on crickets. Some observers speculated about rogue Cuban military operatives, or Russian psychological warfare.

The U.S. government doesn’t refer to these episodes as sonic attacks, in part because the FBI has not been able to establish how they could be performed. In 2017, a State Department spokesperson corrected a reporter who asked about them, replying, “I’m not characterizing it that way. That’s your word. That’s not mine. Twenty-one medically confirmed to have experienced health effects.”

Yet that medical confirmation, from an investigation published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, notes that “a unifying explanation for the symptoms experienced by the U.S. government officials described in this case series remains elusive and the effect of possible exposure to audible phenomena is unclear.”

Spying, not attacking

While sound weapons do exist, a direct attack on an embassy by another state would be a major violation of international law. And that theory wouldn’t explain why officials at the Canadian embassy in Cuba reported similar symptoms despite much better relations with the socialist state.

Kevin Fu, a researcher at the University of Michigan, came up with a more compelling explanation: an interaction between devices emitting ultrasonic sounds too high-frequency for humans to hear—and possibly an interaction between spies and counter-spies.

His work focuses on cybersecurity and internet-of-things devices, which can be manipulated using such signals. For example, hackers can use ultrasonic commands that humans can’t hear to take over voice-controlled devices like Amazon’s Alexa.

Fu and his collaborator Wenyuan Xu, a professor at Zhejiang University in China, as well as her graduate student Chen Yan, examined the sound file released by the U.S. and embedded above. They spotted signs that the noise was being produced not by a single ultrasonic device, but by interactions between two different devices. They were able to generate similar noises to those recorded in Cuba with two ultrasonic devices in their lab.

For example, spies could try to place an ultrasonic transmitter—that is, a listening device—in or near a room containing an ultrasonic jammer used by U.S. officials to try and prevent eavesdropping. In the right circumstances, the transmissions of the two devices could interact, producing painful, high-pitched noises. That would jibe with reports that Americans initially affected were CIA operatives under diplomatic cover.

That said, the same type of sound-inducing interaction could also have come from an array of other devices, from rodent repellers and burglar alarms to security cameras and room-occupancy sensors.

“We don’t know for certain this was the cause,” Fu told IEEE Spectrumin February. “But bad engineering just seems much more likely than a sonic weapon.”

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NASA Is Going Back to Mars, And It's Going Deep

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Mon, 07 May 2018 09:59:39 -0400

A mission more than eight years in the making, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander Saturday. The expedition will give scientists a new understanding of the geology and history of Mars—and perhaps the Earth as well.

LIFTOFF! Humanity’s next mission to Mars has left the pad! @NASAInSight heads into space for a ~6 month journey to Mars where it will take the planet’s vital signs and help us understand how rocky planets formed. Watch: https://t.co/SA1B0Dglms pic.twitter.com/wBqFc47L5p
— NASA (@NASA) May 5, 2018

Launched on an Atlas V rocket from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base shortly after 4:00 am PT (7 am ET), the spacecraft will endure a 6.5-month flight to the fourth planet. There, it is expected to touchdown on Nov. 26, using a combination of heat shields, parachutes and thrusters to slow from 13,200 miles per hour to 5.5 mph in seven minutes, according to Stu Spath, the Lockheed Martin manager who led the team that built the space probe.

After InSight touches down, a robotic arm designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion lab will deploy two key instruments: A seismometer developed by the French space agency, which will be covered with a dome to protect it from winds and vibration, and a probe built by the German space agency that will burrow five meters underneath the martian soil. There, it will measure the temperature of the planet.

A rendering of the Mars InSight rover at work. (NASA)

Data from these sensors will enable planetary scientists to understand how Mars evolved over time and develop a picture of the planet’s internal structure, which is expected to shed light on the evolution of earth and the other rocky planets that occupy the interior of the solar system.

The information InSight gathers could also shed light on the possibility of microbiotic life on Mars today or in the past. Evidence of ice on Mars along with more methane gas in the atmosphere than expected could mean extra-terrestrial bacteria eking out survival in some cranny of the martian surface.

All this data will be relayed back to earth from several NASA satellites already orbiting Mars, through the Deep Space Network that supports all of the space agency’s interplanetary missions. A Lockheed Martin control room in Denver will stay in touch with the lander, along with half-a-dozen other space missions that are controlled there.

InSight is the first mission that NASA has sent to Mars since 2013. The mission also includes two small “cubesats.” Two years from now, NASA expects to launch its next mission, a rover known as Mars 2020.

While the Trump administration is officially shifting its near-term space goal back to the surface of the moon, the push for Martian exploration remains a key goal at the space agency, and at private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is building a rocket designed for interplanetary journeys with the hopes of launching a crewed mission to to Mars within the next decade.

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The Military Will Award $10 Million To The Company That Can Launch Satellites On Short Notice

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 10:00:09 -0400

Military leaders are bullish about small satellites as tools to spy on adversaries and provide secure communications, but there’s just one problem: There isn’t a good way to get them into space, on demand.

Inspired by NASA’s partnerships with rocket makers like SpaceX, the Pentagon is turning to private industry, as half a dozen companies, most backed by venture capitalists, are working to launch small satellites more cheaply than ever to meet the demands of a growing number of small-satellite startups.

“There’s already a lot of commercial money going into development for these boosters,” Todd Master, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency told Quartz at the Space Symposium, a conference bringing together space companies and government officials in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “But nobody is asking them to be much more responsive. Our discussions with them are: Could you go faster? Could you go from anywhere? And they’re like, ‘Yeah, but nobody is asking us to do that.'”

DARPA will ask, by announcing a contest with a $10-million grand prize to any company that can launch two small satellites into orbit in a matter of days. Adding to the difficulty: Competitors will be told where their first launch site is just weeks before the contest, and given the details of the payload and where it is going days before. Once they make their first successful launch, they will have just a few days to go to a second site and launch again. That’s compared to timelines longer than six months for most launches.

“There were not even 100 flights to space in all of last year, in contrast with nearly 100,000 airline flights per day,” Tim Ellis, CEO of rocket start-up Relativity Space and an industry adviser to the National Space Council, told Quartz. “Incentives like the DARPA Launch Challenge help catalyze further investments in the industry to change that.”

The hurdles are not just technical

Peter Beck is the CEO of Rocket Lab, the first of the new small rocket companies to actually deliver satellites into orbit. His company will examine the rules before deciding whether to compete, but he told Quartz that “it’s great to see government validation of our business model.” Currently, small satellites launch as secondary payloads when they can fit in behind large spacecraft typically used by governments and established satellite firms. Rocket Lab and its competitors want to provide dedicated service to the next generation of small spacecraft.

The challenge itself won’t be easy, since the obstacles to frequent launch are as much legal and operational as technical.

“It’s a third the rocket, a third regulatory, and a third infrastructure, and obviously the range fits into the infrastructure and regulatory piece,” said Beck, whose U.S.-based company operates a private launch site in New Zealand. “In order to get frequent, rapid, affordable launch, we had to go to a different country. Everyone acknowledges the problem here in the US with getting that frequent and reliable launch from ranges. This is what the challenge is really about, it’s less about the rocket and the technology, but how do we break down some of those barriers to entry?”

Indeed, the timing of the contest is in part timed to the Federal Aviation Administration’s launch licensing process, which can take more than 180 days. But at the Space Symposium, cutting through red tape has turned into a national security issue.

Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, the civilian official overseeing military space programs, described the current constellation of US satellites as “exquisite glass houses” built “in a world without stones.” Now, as Russia and China demonstrate anti-satellite weapons, there is a need for more resilient systems. One approach is to use many small satellites, operating as a distributed network, instead of one large, inviting target.

“What we’re defending is far more expensive than the cost of the attack, and we’ve got to flip that,” Air Force chief of staff David Goldfein told reporters at the conference.

Beyond resilience, small satellites could offer new capabilities that the U.S. currently lacks. North Korea’s ballistic missile program has inspired renewed interest in using space-based sensors to detect attacks. The Defense Innovation Unit, Experimental (DIUx), another Pentagon technology program, is funding start-ups developing small radar satellites and machine-learning tools to analyze their data.

Rapid launch of small satellites has eluded the US military for years. DARPA alone has funded at least five previous attempts, including SpaceX’s first rocket, Falcon 1, and a scheme to launch satellites from fighter jets. The current Defense Department official who signed off on this contest, undersecretary Michael Griffin, worked on rapid launch systems as a leader in the Strategic Defense Initiative in the late 1980s.

The size of the prize matters

All told, DARPA will offer $30 million in prizes to competing firms, who are invited to meet with government officials at a Los Angeles on May 23.

Aside from Relativity, which isn’t likely to have a rocket ready in time to compete, potential competitors include Rocket Lab; Vector, a firm started by veteran engineers Jim Cantrell and John Garvey; Virgin Orbit, a Richard Branson-backed company developing an air-launch system; and Astra Space, a stealthy startup that recently scrubbed its first test launch.

“With a number of dedicated launch vehicles coming online, the U.S. government has a huge opportunity to take advantage of the increased capacity and diversity being driven by the commercial market and private investment,” Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said. “As is usually the case, the marketplace will determine what concepts and platforms survive and thrive.”

For a sense of how hard this, consider that the $30 million is roughly comparable to the amount offered by the XPrize Foundation’s race to land robots on the moon. “For a very small launch vehicle, that’s lifting less than 20kg to orbit, that’s a very good prize,” Rocket Lab’s Beck said. “For us, it’s in line roughly with what we would be charging a customer anyway. For others, it’s probably not enough to warrant doing.”

Master said that, while the money won’t necessarily cover the expenses of the largest companies, the possibilities of follow-on launch contracts from the military provides an additional incentive.

How to launch small satellites has always been a “chicken and egg problem,” Master said, with small satellite companies failing because they couldn’t get to space, and small rocket companies failing because there weren’t enough small satellites to fly. With private investors now attacking the problem from both sides, the government has little choice but to join in.

“We’re seeing that breaking from both sides,” Master said.

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The Patriot Missile Interceptor Doesn’t Work, But Raytheon Still Makes Billions

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 10:23:31 -0400

The U.S. and its allies the world over are paying billions for medium-range missile interception systems without a track record of success.

A March 25 missile attack launched on Saudi Arabia by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen provided another test of the U.S.-built Patriot missile system, which it apparently failed—cell phone video shows an interceptor suddenly turning and exploding in a Riyadh neighborhood.

Days later, Poland signed a $4.75 billion deal to purchase the Patriot missile system.

The Defense Department has awarded its manufacturer, Raytheon, $3.8 billion in Patriot-related contracts in just the last year. Government auditors say taxpayers have spent more than $6.5 billion since 2004 on the latest iteration of the system. The company’s missile-interceptor division boasts a profit margin of more than 16%, according to industry analysts.

“We do not comment on the operational use of our products,” a Raytheon spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. “We refer you to Saudi authorities. We don’t disclose individual product financials.”

Raytheon’s website says the system has shot down 100 missiles in combat, but the company declined to supply additional detail.

The mobile Patriot system—which includes advanced radar to detect incoming missiles, and a launcher for the rocket-powered interceptors designed to destroy them—has been sold to numerous US allies, including Germany, Bahrain, South Korea, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Romania. (The US Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Department unit charged with combatting ballistic missiles, did not respond to requests for comment by time of publication.)

The Patriot system’s track record has long been called into question. Jeffrey Lewis, an arms-control expert, says he is skeptical that it has ever intercepted a long-range missile in combat operations. Among other evidence, he cites congressional investigators who found that missile’s debut during the Gulf War was likely unsuccessful, with less than 9% of launches resulting in interception.

“The public and the Congress were misled by definitive statements of success issued by administration and Raytheon representatives during and after the war,” a summary of their report concludes.

When I called the Saudi Embassy in Washington for comment on the most recent missile attack, I was transferred to a full voice mailbox. Saudi defense officials have told reporters that all seven of the Houthi missiles were successfully intercepted; they said the same about supposed interceptions in 2017 that Lewis and his colleagues convincingly debunked.

The likely failure of the interceptors is tied to the wave of incoming missiles: Multiple targets can confuse or overwhelm the radar systems designed to track them. Even in perfect conditions, missile defense is tricky business: When the explosive warhead separates from the Burkan-2 missile used by Houthi rebels, it is perhaps two meters tall and less than a meter in diameter, moving more than two kilometers per second. Interceptors have about nine minutes to detect and destroy the warheads between launch and impact.

“Patriot misses most of the time (or even all of the time) for the same reason that hitting .300 (thirty percent!) is considered excellent—it’s hard to hit the nasty stuff they throw in the big leagues. Same thing with long-range missiles,” Lewis wrote Quartz in an e-mail.

There is a case that misrepresenting the capability of these systems offers a deterrent effect on its own, reducing attempts to launch missiles against supposedly protected targets. But the assumption of high-quality of missile defenses can lead policymakers to act as if rhetoric matches reality. This is equally and more frighteningly true of similarly dubious systems designed to stop nuclear missiles targeting the US from across the ocean.

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NASA Says a Design Error is Behind The Failure of a 2015 SpaceX Mission

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 10:12:02 -0400

For the first time, NASA investigators said publicly that a design error was the initiating factor for the destruction of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on a mission to the International Space Station in 2015.

A public summary of their report, released Monday (pdf), expands on SpaceX’s public explanation for the failure of the CRS-7 mission. The rocket company blamed a subcontractor that manufactured a steel strut which snapped during the flight, allowing a helium bottle to break loose and crash through a liquid oxygen tank, which burst, combusted and destroyed the vehicle. NASA says SpaceX should known that the strut was not suited for spaceflight, calling the decision to use it a “design error.”

“SpaceX chose to use an industrial grade (as opposed to aerospace grade) [precipitation-hardening stainless steel] cast part…in a critical load path under cryogenic conditions and strenuous flight environments,” the report says. “The implementation was done without adequate screening or testing of the industrial grade part, without regard to the manufacturer’s recommendations for a 4:1 factor of safety when using their industrial grade part in an application, and without proper modeling or adequate load testing of the part under predicted flight conditions.”

SpaceX CEO and lead designer Elon Musk told reporters after the failure that an individual strut was suspected to be below the manufacturer’s standard, describing a process that examined thousands of the parts and found a few dud struts. In its own report on the accident, SpaceX had noted that the strut was certified to handle 10,000 lbs of force, but failed when subject to just one-fifth of that stress.

Investigators did note that all the issues they identified were resolved when SpaceX launched another NASA payload in January 2016. Their inquiry was completed in December 2015; NASA said it released the summary more than two years later “to maintain historical data of the mishap.” SpaceX no longer makes this version of the Falcon 9, and has flown their rocket successfully 31 times since the accident, with one rocket destroyed during a fueling mishap in September 2016.

“NASA Launch Services Program’s independent review came to the same conclusion as SpaceX—that all credible causes for the anomaly were corrected or mitigated by SpaceX before the company returned to flight,” a SpaceX spokesperson told Quartz. “We appreciate NASA’s insight and continued partnership, and we look forward to next month’s launch of a flight-proven Dragon for the company’s fourteenth resupply mission to the International Space Station (CRS-14) as well as the launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) for NASA.”

Rumors that NASA disagreed with SpaceX’s assessment were rampant after the incident, and a 2016 Inspector General report referenced possible additional causes, like poor installation practices, that could be behind its failure. At the time, NASA demanded a large reorganization at SpaceX to adopt more reliability and safety controls in its hardware supply chain to ensure that accidents like this don’t happen again. SpaceX also ate the cost of the failure, and re-jiggered its program to provide additional flights and services to NASA.

One key to SpaceX’s ability to deliver rockets cheaply has been its willingness to use “off the shelf” components instead of paying inflated sums for space-certified parts from government contractors, replacing old serial bus cables with modern ethernet lines, or using toilet stall handles as latches on spacecraft storage lockers. That strategy may have been pushed too far before the CRS-7 failure.

SpaceX is expected to launch its next mission, for satellite operator Iridium, from Vandenberg Air Force Base on March 29.

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Why a Meeting Between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un Is So Risky

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Mon, 12 Mar 2018 16:12:41 -0400

Donald Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un is a greater concession than he likely understands—and a bigger risk. But why should the presence of two humans in a room have such high stakes?

The reason a U.S. president has never met a North Korean leader is that the U.S. and North Korea have been, and continue to be, at war. Since 1953, a ceasefire has made that conflict largely symbolic, with suffering limited to South Koreans killed in provocative strikes, and the North Koreans who suffer in a gulag state or die fleeing it.

In international diplomacy, the leader-to-leader meeting is the highest level of commitment available. No prior White House would send the president into a summit that has not been pre-scripted with guaranteed results. Should there be no agreement, there is no face-saving blame to be put on negotiators, and little room left for diplomacy. And while the White House says this meeting is not a negotiation, that only raises the question of what the president is even doing there.

To entice Trump, North Korea said it would suspend the nuclear and missile tests it uses to protest military exercises between the US and South Korea. This says more for the success of the North’s nuclear weapons program than it does for the U.S.’s tightening sanctions. Why launch another rocket to gain attention when you can simply demand a meeting with the president of the United States? (Indeed, this is the literal plot of a North Korean propaganda film.)

For his part, Trump will demand an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, which Kim will not surrender without concessions of his own. Reductions in sanctions and an increase in aid could be part of a plan to step down weapons production—although this is the framework of the nuclear agreement with Iran that Trump has lambasted. A push for an actual peace treaty in exchange for denuclearization would be a larger step. And then there is the question of human rights and democracy for the North Korean people; never a priority for Trump, will they be left by the wayside?

That Trump would contemplate offering compromises after years of criticizing them suggests that he has not contemplated much at all (a suspicion that accounts of his decision confirm). Meanwhile, South Korea’s dovish president, Moon Jae-in, is the prime mover behind the Trump-Kim connection. Putting his two spoiled, self-obsessed counterparts together is an extraordinary wager, motivated by impatience at decades of failure. The question is whether Trump will sit still long enough to learn what the US can offer in such talks, and what it shouldn’t.

True, it took Richard Nixon to go to China. But he only went after the groundwork had been laid.

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Trump Says His New Tariffs Are About National Security. They’re Not.

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 16:18:14 -0500

Donald Trump claims that steep new import taxes on aluminum and steel will protect U.S. national security. Few people believe him, and that’s a problem for him—and the world.

Trump’s zero-sum worldview has painted foreign countries as the main threat to American economic prosperity. While that’s a factually dubious position, there’s no question unfair trade practices have undermined the case for globalization: China is widely seen as unfairly subsidizing its aluminum and steel producers, giving them an advantage on the global market and undermining the production of raw metals around the world. But the U.S. imports very little steel from China—less than 2% of its supply—because it has already put in place limits on such imports by challenging China’s subsidies at the World Trade Organization.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration promised its voters more big action on trade. Further WTO challenges could take years, so to make policy more quickly, Trump invoked section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which grants the U.S. the ability to impose trade restrictions in the name of national security. Yet the administration’s approach to negotiating those trade restrictions throws its whole “national security” case out the window.

Here’s the bigger picture: The global economy such as we know it today operates under a set of trade rules—mostly, the removal of a lot of trade barriers—that created the WTO in the 1990s. (A further round of trade negotiations, focused on redressing the problems facing developing countries, began in 2001 and is still, hypothetically, ongoing.) These rules have enabled a massive reduction of global poverty and growing prosperity, and also massive economic and cultural dislocation.

The rules, as a massive global compromise, are disliked by basically everyone. Yet paying lip service to the framework has been key to globalization and the relatively peaceful coexistence of great powers in the post-Cold War age, even as the locus of trade negotiations has moved from the stagnant WTO to regional deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. One norm is that exceptions for national security should be actually related to national security.

The U.S. rarely invokes national security to raise trade barriers; it hasn’t brought a successful case since the 1980s. In the case of steel and aluminum, most analysts argued that the U.S. has access to reliable supplies from allies like Canada, South Korea and Brazil, the major foreign suppliers of U.S. steel. Steel and aluminum smelting technology is not advanced beyond the reach of U.S. manufacturers; indeed, U.S. metal production has remained steady; the real threat to jobs comes from increasing productivity.

This time around, the U.S. abandoned this standard and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a long-time investor in the steel industry, ruled that buying metal from allies was no longer sufficient. That will allow the U.S. to impose new tariffs—which will mostly punish the country’s closest political and economic counter-parts. Indeed, more U.S. jobs are likely to be lost (pdf) at metal-goods manufacturers than gained in producing raw metals. “The Chinese are not really targeted by these actions at all,” Edward Alden, a former Financial Times reporter who follows trade issues closely, said.

And Trump has now linked the metal tariffs to on-going talks between the U.S., Mexico and Canada to re-negotiate the trade rules between the three closely linked nations. “Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum will only come off if new & fair NAFTA agreement is signed,” the president wrote this morning. Either these new tariffs protect an industry that is vital to the safety of the U.S., or they are a bargaining chip to be used against other economic gains—but they cannot be both.

Even suggesting that the tariffs are negotiable will undermine their rationale, Michael Froman, a former trade negotiator during the Obama administration said today, arguing that private investors are unlikely to increase funding in metal production if they believe the rules will be changed again at the drop of the hat. But Froman’s larger concern was that abusing the national security provision could undermine the entire trade framework.

This goes beyond the fear of tit-for-tat tariffs designed to punish U.S. industries for symbolic purposes, as the EU has said it will deploy if Trump enacts the new tariffs, or even the $14.2 billion in retaliation that the WTO could authorize if it rules that the U.S. is abusing trade rules.

One constant complaint about the world trade rules is that they privilege American agricultural producers, who benefit from U.S. subsidies and enormous productivity gains from technology compared to farmers in developing nations. There is little to stop another country from declaring their food supply a national security issue and imposing new tariffs in response to U.S. subsidies.

Froman suggested such a dynamic might bring “the WTO to a moment of crisis.” Viewing the clunky bureaucracy governing global trade, some critics have suggested such a crisis might be welcome. Yet it’s hard to imagine a breakdown in the economic system proving to be easier for the global have-nots than the global haves.

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Donald Trump Wants to Shut Down The International Space Station and Get Ready For Private Space

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 15:39:13 -0500

The White House would cut off funding for the International Space Station in 2025 and lean into a future of commercially operated habitats in low-earth orbit, according to draft National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) budget documents shared with Quartz ahead of their official release Monday (Feb. 12).

The documents show an administration that is eager to put a new emphasis on human space exploration, but unwilling to spend enough to dramatically speed NASA’s long-term—and long-delayed—plans to return Americans to space without leveraging growing private investment.

President Donald Trump’s 2019 budget request envisions NASA working closely with the private sector on every level, from outsourcing ground-to-space communications to landing on the moon, while focusing its own efforts on technology to take people into deep space. The budget would increase NASA’s spending by $375 million, to just under $20 billion annually.

The White House expects to stop spending on the International Space Station within seven years, and plans to create a new $150 million program to prepare private companies to take over operations on the ISS, or to replace it with their own space habitats. Bigelow Aerospace, which has a habitat hosted on the ISS and a dubious extraterrestrial research contract to boot, and Nanoracks, which works with NASA to launch satellites from ISS and with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to fly research payloads, have called for such programs for years.

Whether sufficient private demand for human time in space exists to finance these operations remains an open question. While the national lab onboard ISS remains underutilized, some companies (like Bezos, or the founders of Made in Space) think orbital manufacturing has a future, and others think space tourism or resource extraction could be lucrative.

The president’s budget also moves ahead to fund new partnerships with private companies to land robots on the moon, and accelerates a plan to launch the first segment of a moon-orbiting habitat on a private rocket by 2020. It would modestly increase spending on vehicles to explore deep space, particularly a rocket called SLS being built by Boeing and a spacecraft called Orion built by Lockheed Martin, which is expected to fly its first mission in 2020. It also funds new spacecraft, built by Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, that are expected to fly astronauts to ISS next year.

None of these changes are likely to significantly speed the return of astronauts to the ISS or beyond, though they could provide a boost to private companies that hope to move more rapidly than the government when it comes to space exploration.

To do all this, the White House budget cuts $100 million from ISS’s operating account, eliminates NASA’s independent education program, and reduces funding for earth science. Trump still wants to shut down DSCOVR, the climate-change monitoring satellite perched between the earth and the sun, as well cancel several future earth science satellites proposed by NASA scientists. The budget also directs NASA to replace the satellite ground systems it uses to communicate with its spacecraft with privately-operated alternatives.

The lawmakers who will finalize NASA’s spending plan in the months ahead are likely to make significant changes to this vision. Though its costs are seen by some as weighing down the entire space program, others are reluctant to decommission the ISS after investing billions of dollars in the project. Indeed, so far, Trump has been unable to even confirm his controversial pick, Oklahoma congressman Jim Bridenstine, to run the space agency.

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U.S. Nuclear Test Killed Far More Civilians Than We Knew

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 15:58:26 -0500

When the U.S. entered the nuclear age, it did so recklessly. New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.

The study, performed by University of Arizona economist Keith Meyers , uses a novel method (pdf) to trace the deadly effects of this radiation, which was often consumed by Americans drinking milk far from the site of atomic tests.

From 1951 to 1963, the U.S. tested nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada. Weapons researchers, not understanding the risks—or simply ignoring them—exposed thousands of workers to radioactive fallout. The emissions from nuclear reactions are deadly to humans in high doses, and can cause cancer even in low doses. At one point, researchers had volunteers stand underneath an airburst nuclear weapon to prove how safe it was :

The emissions, however, did not just stay at the test site, and drifted in the atmosphere. Cancer rates spiked in nearby communities, and the US government could no longer pretend that fallout was anything but a silent killer.

The cost in dollars and lives

Congress eventually paid more than $2 billion to residents of nearby areas that were particularly exposed to radiation, as well as uranium miners. But attempts to measure the full extent of the test fallout were very uncertain, since they relied on extrapolating effects from the hardest-hit communities to the national level. One national estimate found the testing caused 49,000 cancer deaths.

Those measurements, however, did not capture the full range of effects over time and geography. Meyers created a broader picture by way of a macabre insight: When cows consumed radioactive fallout spread by atmospheric winds, their milk became a key channel to transmit radiation sickness to humans. Most milk production during this time was local, with cows eating at pasture and their milk being delivered to nearby communities, giving Meyers a way to trace radioactivity across the country.

The National Cancer Institute has records of the amount of Iodine 131—a dangerous isotope released in the Nevada tests—in milk, as well as broader data about radiation exposure. By comparing this data with county-level mortality records, Meyers came across a significant finding: “Exposure to fallout through milk leads to immediate and sustained increases in the crude death rate.” What’s more, these results were sustained over time. U.S. nuclear testing likely killed seven to 14 times more people than we had thought, mostly in the midwest and northeast.

A weapon against its own people

When the U.S. used nuclear weapons during World War II, bombing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conservative estimates suggest 250,000 people died in immediate aftermath. Even those horrified by the bombing didn’t realize that the U.S. would deploy similar weapons against its own people, accidentally, and on a comparable scale.

And the cessation of nuclear testing helped save U.S. lives—”the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty might have saved between 11.7 and 24.0 million American lives,” Meyers estimates. There was also some blind luck involved in reducing the number of poisoned people: The Nevada Test Site, compared to other potential testing facilities the US government considered at the time, produced the lowest atmospheric dispersal.

The lingering affects of these tests remain, as silent and as troublesome as the isotopes themselves. Millions of Americans who were exposed to fallout likely suffer illnesses related to these tests even today, as they retire and rely on the U.S. government to fund their health care.

“This paper reveals that there are more casualties of the Cold War than previously thought, but the extent to which society still bears the costs of the Cold War remains an open question,” Meyers concludes.

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Why Donald Trump Wants to Go Back to the Moon

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 16:32:46 -0500

Today Donald Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, an order to send humans back to the moon and beyond. A draft copy of the order seen by Quartz declares that “the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.”

It’s a bold promise, timed to the 45th anniversary of Apollo 17, the final human mission to the moon. It’s also a promise that has been made by three previous presidents, each of whom was defeated by the political and financial challenges of deep space exploration.

Trump isn’t having an easy time so far: His nominee to run NASA, Jim Bridenstine, faces opposition from lawmakers. And real questions about the US return to the moon will be answered when NASA’s next budget is written, not today. The U.S. space agency has not designed a moon landing vehicle or other infrastructure for taking astronauts to the moon, and it will struggle to perform a moon landing during Trump’s term in office. (NASA’s current deep space exploration plan includes a new heavy rocket called the Space Launch System and a space capsule, called Orion, which will fly astronauts around the moon in 2019; it is also considering building a new space station in lunar orbit as a kind of stepping-stone.)

One advantage Trump has over his predecessors is an array of private companies investing in space exploration beyond low-earth orbit. NASA is already working with closely with lunar exploration companies like Moon Express, which received regulatory permission for a moon mission last year, and Astrobotic, a Carnegie Mellon spin-off that says it has a $1 billion manifest (pdf) to deliver to the lunar surface.

“A permanent presence on the moon and American boots on the surface Mars are not impossible,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, said in October; the company’s founder, Elon Musk, has said his next rocketwill be designed around visiting the moon as well as his beloved Mars. “It’s time for America to return to the Moon—this time to stay,” Blue Origin executive Brett Alexander said in September, describing a lunar lander being developed by Jeff Bezos’ space company and promising additional investment if NASA was willing to partner with the firm. Meanwhile, Boeing’s CEO has promised the first astronauts to visit Mars will get there on one of his company’s rockets.

But why are so many interested in getting back to the moon, anyway?

Water and money

One irony about the Apollo astronauts is that they missed what newer robotic explorers didn’t: There is likely water, and perhaps quite a bit of it, on the moon.

The presence of water could make new activities: Cheaper long-term space habitation, thanks to the ability to grow food and create oxygen from water; and cheaper rocket propellant, if engineers can produce hydrogen and oxygen in space rather than bringing it up from earth. This could in turn bring futuristic business plans, like space tourism, asteroid mining, and orbital manufacturing, within reach of entrepreneurs. And, there may be other useful chemicals to be extracted from the moon, like Helium-3. George Sowers, who leads the space resources program at Colorado School of Mines, compares water on the moon to oil in the Persian Gulf, suggesting that there will be soon be an international scramble for claims on the moon.

Geopolitical tensions

Which brings us to a second motivator: China’s ambitious space program has announced that it wants to land humans on the moon by 2036. The European Space Agency has long argued in favor of a lunar village exploration concept. The US government doesn’t want to find itself left out a return to the moon, especially because American companies are likely to be among the first to stretch the current legal framework for space to its breaking point.

International space treaties, written in the early days of space exploration, leave much to interpretation and don’t account for commerce in space. Facts on the ground—or the lunar regolith—will matter in future debates over how people cooperate in space. US military is already talking up its new approach to space as a warfighting environment. Certainly, space entrepreneurs aren’t hesitant to invoke the international conflict. Robert Bigelow, who wants to build hotels on the moon, shared this slideshow during a recent conference to encourage the US to take action:

(Bigelow Aerospace)

Exploration and science

There are plenty of people in the space policy world who think that humans should set their sights directly on Mars and not waste time with a return to the moon. Yet lunar missions could enable, rather than hinder, more ambitious journeys into space.

Returning to the moon could help researchers understanding the health challenges faced by people who spend a long time in space. If ideas about water on the moon prove true, manufacturing propellant there could enable cheaper missions to Mars. Building out scientific infrastructure on the moon could create new opportunities for astronomers to get a clearer picture of the universe and planetary scientists to learn about the history of the earth. There’s still much to learn about the earth’s most important satellite.

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The Most Urgent Call For Trump To Solve the U.S. Opioid Crisis Comes From the White House

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 16:24:26 -0500

Donald Trump has resisted calls to throw resources into the fight against opioid addiction, but now the call is coming from inside the White House: New research from the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) says the cost of the crisis in 2015 was more than $500 billion, almost 3% of US annual economic production.

The report (pdf) attempts to measure the economic cost of growing dependence on opioids in the US, which affects at least 2.4 million Americans. In 2015, the year the new report focuses on, more than 30,000 Americans died of an opioid overdose. The spread of opioid addiction is seen as tied to economic malaise in the US (though perhaps not caused by it) and even to Trump’s election.

Today, opioid deaths are reaching record highs, while hard-hit states struggle to pay for autopsies and transport corpses.

(White House CEA)

The new report argues that attempts to gauge the cost of the crisis usually underestimate losses associated with overdose fatalities, and that is why their estimate is much larger than others. Recent estimates using the costs associated with responding to the epidemic find a 2015 cost of over $70 billion. But the economic costs of those lives lost range from $220 billion to $550 billion; the CEA settled on just over $500 billion as their final total estimate.

Despite the inherent ugliness of putting a price on a human life, it’s a worthy exercise to drives home the enormous cost of opioid addiction on society; it’s likely that the current cost exceeds these 2015 estimates.

Yet the report is somewhat baffling, since public health experts are still waiting for the Trump administration to take action. While the president declared opioid addiction a public health emergency in October, little will happen until he makes a deal with Congress to fund action.

“Sadly, he didn’t ‘show me the money,’ failing to offer the massive, new resources necessary to help reverse the escalating opioid epidemic and sustain millions of Americans in recovery,” Chuck Ingoglia of the National Council of Behavioral Health wrote after Trump’s announcement.

A fact sheet distributed by the White House today notes that $1 billion has been spent to fight drug addiction since Trump came into office, though much of that would have been appropriated under the Obama administration. The FDA has also announced new rules for the manufacturers of these drugs, designed to help prevent over-prescription of painkillers that many experts see as the root cause of the health emergency.

Contrast that with the action taken by 41 states to sue or investigate the makers of these drugs, which could result in a multi-billion dollar settlement akin to those won against Big Tobacco in the nineties. Despite growing evidence that abusive marketing practices by opioid makers like Purdue played a role in the crisis, federal prosecutors only began looking into the case last month. Trump’s original nominee to lead the White House’s response to the crisis was mainly known for his coziness with the drug industry and gutting the Drug Enforcement Agency’s ability to shut down pill mills.

The White House has been criticized for focusing on drug use as a moral failing, to be solved by advertising campaigns costing hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, the administration supports major cuts to Medicaid, the public health insurance program that provides a significant share of the funding used to treat drug addiction. Trump’s administration has also not embraced Naloxone, a medication that can prevent overdose fatalities, the largest cost of the crisis identified by his own administration.

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Donald Trump’s Choice to Lead America Back to The Moon Has a New Take on Climate Change

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 16:11:49 -0400

On Wednesday, senator Bill Nelson leveled a broad attack: You are unqualified, too divisive, and too extreme, with a history of questioning climate science, advocating discrimination against LGBT Americans, and personally attacking people like former president Barack Obama and senator John McCain.

He wasn’t talking about president Donald Trump. Nelson was talking about Donald Trump’s choice to lead NASA, representative Jim Bridenstine, a still-boyish 42 year-old with a passion for aerospace.

A former Naval aviator elected in 2012 to represent Oklahoma in Congress, Bridenstine made his name as a zealous advocate of conservative policies. He dove into debates over immigration, climate change, and national security, and joined the Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republicans who battle not just Democrats but any Republican leader seeking bipartisan middle ground.

NASA, on the other hand, is among the most non-partisan agencies in the US government. It is traditionally backed by both parties and run by non-politicians; the typical administrator has been an experienced engineer, a former astronaut, or civil servant with experience managing huge budgets. Now, the agency may have a very 2017 culture-clash brewing.

Bridenstine used today’s Senate nomination hearing to recast or downplay his more controversial views. “I’ve been involved in a number of very difficult issues and represented my constituents the best I absolutely could,” he said of his time in the House. “It is very different representing the first district of Oklahoma than from being NASA administrator.”

Yet, with only limited management and technical experience compared to his predecessors, Bridenstine’s main advantage should be his congressional experience. In theory it will give him the savvy to address NASA’s biggest problem: Ensuring lawmakers give it the funding to match its missions, or missions that match its funding. In practice, that may be difficult for a man who less than a year ago explained that he voted to shut down the government in order to reject “the Washington Machine and the Washington Cartel, the lobbyists, the special interest groups, the political action committees and even the party apparatus” who control the budget process.

Bridenstine’s Republican defenders argue that bringing up his past political statements is, according to Colorado senator Cory Gardner, “wildly inappropriate” during a discussion of a non-partisan agency’s leadership. Setting aside campaign rhetoric, there are two key issues that do matter greatly to his potential management of the space agency.

One is climate science. NASA’s satellites are among the biggest providers of data to researchers studying climate change. Bridenstine has supported legislation that would cut funding for those programs. At his hearing, Bridenstine said he believes humans play a role in climate change, and that he would protect climate research and let science drive decision-making. He didn’t explain how his opinion had evolved, and under probing questions from Hawaii senator Brian Schatz, declined to say how important the human role is. NASA’s own positionis more precise: It cites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to conclude there is a “95% probability that human activities over the past 50 years have warmed our planet.”

The other major criticism concerned his relationship with NASA’s 18,000 employees. Bridenstine defended Trump after his “grab ’em by the pussy” description of sexual assault became public in 2016, and has called homosexuality immoral. At the hearing, several senators asked him if could be trusted to protect NASA’s female and LGBT employees. Each time, Bridenstine declined to reply to specific concerns over his views on women and the LGBT community, instead offering a variation on the observation that “that every human being has value and every person has worth.” That may not allay concerns among the space agency’s workers but will likely serve the purpose of winning confirmation.

Indeed, Bridenstine is expected to be confirmed, if only because Republicans still control the senate. But he has also won over many in the space industry. In Congress, he was an enthusiastic backer of the new generation of commercial space companies like SpaceX, and their hopes of turning low-earth orbit into a venue for profit. He has also pledged to support NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, which matters because of the political clout of the contractors behind the project, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Space organizations that have endorsed him, like the Mars Society, believe he will bring a shot of needed energy to NASA.

The Oklahoman’s backers say his controversial past doesn’t outweigh the benefits of fresh thinking at a time when Trump is shifting the US toward an ambitious return to the moon and highlighting the importance of space to national security. Yet if he wins his confirmation on party lines, it may undermine his authority to make change from the get-go.

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Cuba Says Cicadas Are Behind the 'Sonic Attacks' That Injured U.S. Diplomats in Havana

Tim Fernholz, Quartz — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 10:10:46 -0400

The US pulled the bulk of its diplomats from Cuba in September, blaming attacks on its staff that caused hearing loss and concussions. Cuba has denied any involvement, and now it is offering a counter-explanation: The alleged “sonic attacks” are coming from cicadas and crickets.

That detail comes from an AP report on a television special aired in Cuba yesterday to refute the US narrative about flagging diplomatic relations.

“We compared the spectrums of the sounds and evidently this common sound is very similar to the sound of a cicada,” Lt. Col. Juan Carlos Molina, a Cuban government expert, said on the television broadcast Alleged Sonic Attacks. The program also claimed sufficiently loud insect noises could “ produce hearing loss, irritation and hypertension in situations of prolonged exposure.”

The US embassy was only reopened in 2016. Since the attacks, the Trump administration, which opposes normalizing relations with Cuba, has expelled Cuban representatives from the US and issued a warning against travel to the island nation.

“We’ve seen a sharp rise in concerns among would-be travelers to Cuba surrounding these unexplained attacks, and a decrease in overall business as a result of those fears,” Brady Hiatt, a Cuba travel consultant, told Quartz.

US travelers can visit Cuba for a variety of educational and humanitarian purposes, but trade and tourist travel, along with doing business with many government-owned entities, is officially prohibited. The Cuban economy, which entered a recession at the beginning of this year, needs all the visiting dollars it can get.

In late 2015, the Obama administration and the Cuban government began an opening process designed to re-link the two countries , which had been stuck in a Cold War conflict since a 1958 embargo imposed by the US on the socialist Cuban government. Despite great enthusiasm from the public, hard-liners on both sides—among Cuba’s socialists and American anti-communists—criticized the opening.

In late 2016, American diplomats began reporting symptoms of hearing loss, dizziness, and headaches; later tests revealed some to be suffering from brain injuries . US investigators suspected the cause was a sonic weapon broadcasting noise above audible frequencies, but have not said more. The plot thickened this summer as Canadian diplomats, who traditionally maintain better relations with Cuba than the US, also complained of sonic attacks and similar symptoms.

US authorities released a sample of the sound , which the Cubans analyzed to discover insect sounds:

The US government is still analyzing the recording to determine exactly what happened, but acknowledges that it might not have picked up higher frequencies involved in the incidents. The White House insists that Cuba must be held responsible for not preventing the attacks; Havana now says it cannot control crickets and cicadas.

Speculation to the real cause abounds. Some American officials blame rogue factions of the Cuban military, which see opening to the US as leading to a loss of their own power. Regular Cuban citizens perceive this is as more propaganda from the United States. Some regional experts have wondered if Russian forces, experienced in psychological conflict, are trying to drive a wedge between US and Cuban rapprochement as another front in a new Cold War.

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