Nov. 4 (UPI) — President Donald Trump tapped Jared Isaacman to lead NASA on Tuesday just months after withdrawing his nomination of the billionaire entrepreneur to lead the space agency.
Trump announced the reversal in a social media post praising Isaacman who has twice flown to space on private missions.
“Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new era,” Trump wrote.
However, Trump did not explain his aboutface on Isaacman, who saw his nomination withdrawn in May just ahead of the Senate’s confirmation vote. At the time, Trump cited a “thorough review of prior associations” as the reason for withdrawing Isaacman’s nomination.
Isaacman is a commercial astronaut who has ties to SpaceX, a space transportation and aeronautics company headed by business titan Elon Musk. Trump withdrew Isaacman’s nomination the same day Musk left the White House after his stint running the Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk’s departure precipitated a very public rift with Trump, who later took to social media to call his former political ally a “train wreck” who had sought to have “one of his close friends run NASA.” That close friend, Trump wrote in his post, was a “blue-blooded Democrat who had never contributed to a Republican before.”
Since withdrawing Isaacman’s nomination, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been serving as interim NASA administrator.
Isaacman, for his part, responded with a post on X thanking Trump and expressing gratitude to the “space-loving community.”
“To the innovators building the orbital economy, to the scientists pursuing breakthrough discoveries and to dreamers across the world eager for a return to the Moon and the grand journey beyond–these are the most exciting times since the dawn of the space age– and I truly believe the future we have all been waiting for will soon become reality,” he wrote.
Kim Kardashian, long at the center of a few conspiracy theories herself, has cosigned one that’s a fan favorite — and also thoroughly debunked.
During the most recent episode of Hulu’s “The Kardashians,” the fashion and beauty mogul professed her belief that the 1969 moon landing, a watershed moment of great American pride, never really happened. She also tried to get her “All’s Fair” co-star Sarah Paulson to drink the Kool-Aid.
“I’m sending you, like, so far a million interviews with both Buzz Aldrin and the other one [Neil Armstrong],” Kardashian told Paulson on the show.
“Yes, do it,” Paulson told the Skims founder, promising to go on her own “massive deep dive.”
Kardashian then went on to cite an interview that’s made the rounds on TikTok wherein she alleged that Buzz Aldrin — who completed the Apollo 11 mission alongside Armstrong and capsule communicator Michael Collins — gave the hoax away. (The going theory, of course, is that famous footage of the mission was actually filmed on a sound stage.)
“So I think it didn’t happen,” Kardashian concluded, adding that Aldrin, 95, has “gotten old and now he, like, slurs.”
Hours after the episode dropped, NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy fact-checked the socialite.
“Yes, @KimKardashian, we’ve been to the Moon before… 6 times!” Duffy wrote Thursday on X. “And even better: @NASAArtemis is going back under the leadership of @POTUS.”
“We won the last space race and we will win this one too,” Duffy wrote.
As for Aldrin’s takes on the matter, a 2022 Reuters article debunked one of the most popular clips used to implicate the former astronaut, which was was taken out of very critical context.
In a shortened version of the clip, Conan O’Brien recounts to Aldrin a childhood memory of his family watching the astronauts walk on the moon.
“No, you didn’t,” Aldrin responds, seemingly contradicting O’Brien’s account. Later in the interview, however, Aldrin clarified that the moon landing itself was authentic, but the animated footage broadcast by TV stations at the time was not.
The National Air and Space Museum has explained that there was a $2.3-million camera on board to capture the real-life images that were sent back to Earth.
Nonetheless, Kardashian doubled down on her opinion when a producer on “The Kardashians” probed further.
“For the record, you think that we didn’t walk on the moon?” the producer asked.
“I don’t think we did. I think it was fake,” Kardashian said, adding that she’s seen several videos of Aldrin allegedly disputing the event.
“Why does Buzz Aldrin say it didn’t happen?” she said. “There’s no gravity on the moon. Why is the flag blowing? The shoes that they have in the museum that they wore on the moon is a different print in the photos. Why are there no stars?”
For what it’s worth, there is gravity on the moon, albeit about a sixth of what it is on Earth, give or take. Hence the footage of astronauts bouncing across the lunar surface but not flying off into space. As far as there being no breeze, NASA planned for the lack of one — a rod can be seen holding up the top of flag, because scientists knew the stars and stripes wouldn’t fly without one. And did we mention that Aldrin did not say it didn’t happen? Yes, we did. We did mention that.
To her credit, Kardashian was self-aware enough to add that people were “gonna say I’m crazy no matter what.”
She also encouraged viewers to look for themselves on Tiktok. Keep in mind, though, the accounts that regularly promote the moon-landing conspiracy theory are also fond of other mistaken notions, like saying the Earth is flat and aliens built the pyramids.
It’s no secret that flights and hotels have increased in price, but for one traveller, the cost of their trip was dubbed ‘a trip to the moon with NASA’ as it saw a whopping price increase
Travellers were stunned at the holiday price increase(Image: Getty Images/Stock Image)
Gone are the days of booking a flight seat for £15.99 and an all-inclusive hotel for £100 as prices for a getaway abroad shoot up. But for one traveller, they were left baffled after their holiday package increased by a whopping £17million, prompting people to label it as much as a “trip to the moon with NASA”.
The holidaymaker, who didn’t reveal the exact details of their elaborate holiday, shared a screenshot of the cost inflation while using the TUI website. What started out as an £8million trip jumped to a staggering increase of £17million.
In a message on the TUI website, with the title ‘The cost of your holiday has increased’, it read: “We’re sorry to say the price for your holiday has gone up by £17734902.34. It’s because this trip uses flights from a third-party airline.
“We receive the latest prices from the airline a few times each day, but the price might change when we come to request the actual seats. Your new total is shown in the holiday summary.”
While it’s uncertain what the traveller put into the booking website, he shared the screenshot and wrote on Reddit: “So, £297 for both with flights seemed a little too good to be true, so I went through the motions. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have £18,000,000 in the bank to spend 4 days in Athens, even with the £2m discount.”
The post was met with a flurry of comments as everyone applauded the post. One asked: “Who are the third party airline, NASA?”
A second added: “Just a short layover on the moon.” “Sounds more like a Space X side hustle to me. Uber x Space X if you will”, a third penned.
“NASA’s having a…. bit of time off”, another shared. “Its only £120 deposit. Put it on klarna,” a fifth wrote.
While another wrote: “I feel you OP. I hate when they add on that little 69p to the price like that too. Like it’s such a sneaky trick. You can sort of rationalise it by convincing yourself you’re only paying £8867599 but let’s be honest here, you’re really paying more like £8867600.”
Someone else remarked: “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday”, before another chimed in with: “And right now you can save £1m per person. That’s £4m off for a family of four!”
A TUI spokesperson said the error was likely caused by a technical error, and they’d like to apologise for the confusion.
Joan Higginbotham, who spent 12 days aboard the International Space Station and on a NASA Shuttle mission, now promotes STEM subjects in her role at the Kennedy Space Centre Visitor Complex
An astronaut deploys a tried-and-tested technique to ensure that she never forgets an item when on holiday.
As one might suspect of a NASA astronaut with an electrical engineering degree and time aboard the International Space Station under her belt, Joan Higginbotham is, as she puts it, “very analytical”.
The Chicago-born 60-year-old has many accolades, including being one of only five African American women to have gone to space and forming part of the crew of the STS-116 mission aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.
She can also proudly claim to be one of the most methodical suitcase packers out there.
“Part of my DNA is being very analytical, shall we say. As I’m packing, I will make a checklist, which probably speaks to me being an astronaut, as everything we do is via a checklist. We go to the bathroom via a checklist. That is how I organise my packing, I do it by days, I look at the weather, look at whether what I’m wearing is weather appropriate. I will be very transparent. I have an Excel spreadsheet. It goes by day, I map out what I’m going to wear. My husband makes fun of me. I remind him I have never forgotten anything,” Joan explained during a trip to London.
Joan had a 10-year wait after joining the astronaut programme before she was assigned a mission and eventually got to space. During this time, she lost seven of her ASCAN classmates in the devastating 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia accident.
Three years later, she participated in the STS-116 mission aboard Space Shuttle Discovery, which saw her join a crew of seven as a “mission specialist” and spend 12 days in space helping to assemble and upgrade the International Space Station.
Joan’s career began in 1987 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre, where, as a Payload Electrical Engineer, she helped to prepare and launch more than 53 Space Shuttle missions. Now she has returned to the Florida space centre as an ambassador, spreading her passion for STEM by meeting young space enthusiasts.
“We are promoting the KSC visitor complex, where visitors can come and do interesting things related to space,” Joan said of her trip to London.
“I like to tout a couple of things that I’ve tried. One is the Shuttle launch simulator; if I had gone on it first, I don’t know if I would’ve gone on the real Shuttle. (The real shuttle) has a lot of motion. There is a lot of shaking, rattling and rolling in the real thing, you will get that in the simulation as well. It is a very interesting ride.
“There is also a virtual reality interactive event where you go on a mission to the Moon with three other people, and you help mine moon rocks. It is kind of a competitive thing. I did not win. There is something called the Launch Complex 39, a 360-degree view of every active launch pad at the space centre.”
The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex was ranked the top attraction in the United States and third globally by Tripadvisor in their 2025 Travelers’ Choice Awards. As well as rides and space simulations, one of its big selling points is the presence of retired astronauts such as Joan and Bruce Melnick, who are on hand to chat with members of the public.
The latest guest experience at the Centre is the reworked Kennedy Space Center Bus Tour, which now includes a stop at The Gantry at LC-39. Opened in July 2025, The Gantry at LC-39 offers 360-degree panoramic views of active launch pads and the surrounding wildlife refuge, a full-scale rocket engine that comes to life during a simulated static-fire test – complete with thunderous sound, dazzling lights, and mist.
Hands-on exhibits including a Rocket Build Interactive for designing and virtually launching rockets, and a cutting-edge Earth Information Center showcasing NASA’s planet-monitoring efforts through immersive visuals and interactive media are among the other new draws.
New for Christmas 2025 is a space-themed drone show. Guests can enjoy a brand-new nightly show during the Holidays in Space festive celebrations.
Time your visit right and you’ll be able to watch a live rocket launch from behind NASA’s gates, complete with live commentary from space experts. While weather and technical issues mean that seeing a blast-off is never a sure-fire thing, Kennedy Space Center is on pace for a record-breaking number of launches in 2025.
The crew of Artemis II will not land on the moon but will lay the groundwork for the first crewed missions to Mars.
Published On 23 Sep 202523 Sep 2025
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NASA may be headed back to the moon months sooner than originally planned, with the agency announcing that the first crewed flight in its Artemis programme could make the trip around the moon and back as early as February.
The space agency’s Artemis programme is the flagship effort by the United States to return humans to the moon, a multibillion-dollar series of missions that rivals a similar effort by China, which is aiming for a 2030 astronaut moon landing.
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In the first Artemis mission, an uncrewed spacecraft travelled around the moon and back in November 2022.
The goal of the Artemis II mission, a 10-day flight around the moon and back, is to “explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars”, according to NASA.
The crew of Artemis II will not land on the moon but will be the first to travel beyond low Earth orbit since 1972, the BBC reported.
The mission was originally planned for April, but it could be moved up to February.
“We together have a front row seat to history,” Lakiesha Hawkins, NASA’s acting deputy associate administrator, said in a news conference on Tuesday. “The launch window could open as early as the fifth of February, but we want to emphasise that safety is our top priority.”
Artemis II is meant to be a test for the agency’s more ambitious mission, Artemis III, currently planned for 2027, and will involve a moon lander variant of SpaceX’s Starship rocket. The goal for Artemis III is to land on the moon.
Artemis II involves NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and its Orion capsule. The Orion capsule will ride atop the giant, 98-metre-tall (322 feet) SLS rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first time the spacecraft duo will fly with humans.
NASA’s most famous lunar excursion took place more than 50 years ago, when Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon in 1969 while acting as the commander of Apollo 11.
WASHINGTON — Early in his first term, President Trump held a modest ceremony directing NASA to return humans to the moon for the first time in 50 years. It was a goalpost set without a road map. Veterans of the space community reflected on the 2017 document, conspicuously silent on budgets and timelines, equivocating between excitement and concern.
Was Trump setting up a giveaway to special interests in the aerospace community? Or was he setting forth a real strategic vision for the coming decade, to secure American leadership in the heavens?
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It was a return to a plan first proposed by President George W. Bush in 2004, then abandoned by President Obama in 2010, asserting the moon as a vital part of American ambitions in space. Whether to return to the lunar surface at all — or skip it to focus on Mars — was a long-standing debate governing the division of resources at NASA, where every project is precious, holding extraordinary promise for the knowledge of mankind, yet requiring consistent, high-dollar funding commitments from a capricious Congress.
Eight years on, the debate is over. Trump’s policy shift has blazed a new American trail in space — and spawned an urgent race with China that is fast approaching the finish line.
Both nations are in a sprint toward manned missions to the lunar surface by the end of this decade, with sights on 2029 as a common deadline — marking the end of Trump’s presidency and, in China, the 80th anniversary of the People’s Republic.
A “What Will 2030 Look Like?” sign behind Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, during a confirmation hearing in April.
(Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
It is a far different race from the original, against the Soviet Union, when U.S. astronauts inspired the world with a televised landing in 1969. This time, Washington would not just plant a flag and return its astronauts home. Instead, the Americans plan to stay, establishing a lunar base that would test humanity’s ability to live beyond Earth.
China has similar plans. And with both countries aiming for the same strategic area of the surface — the south pole of the moon, where peaks of eternal light shine alongside crevices of permanent darkness, believed to store frozen water — the stakes of the race are grounded in national security. Whichever nation establishes a presence there first could lay claim to the region for themselves.
The world’s first full-scale model of the crewed pressurized lunar rover, to be used in the Artemis moon exploration program, is displayed during a press preview in July.
(Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP via Getty Images)
Advocates of the U.S. effort, called the Artemis program, increasingly fear that delays at NASA and its private sector partners, coupled with proposed funding cuts to NASA from the Trump administration, could ensure China’s victory in a race with broad consequences for U.S. interests.
So it is a race that Trump started. The question is whether he can finish it.
While U.S. intelligence officials have assessed that Beijing is on track to meet its goals, NASA veterans say that accomplishing a manned mission before the Chinese appears increasingly out of reach.
“It’s a stretch,” said G. Scott Hubbard, a leader in human space exploration for the last half-century who served as NASA’s first “Mars czar” and former director of the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. “Bottom line, yes, it is doable. It’ll take an intense effort by the best engineers, and appropriate funding.
“It’s not inconceivable,” he added.
Visitors take photos of a space suit during an event marking China’s Space Day at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang province.
(Wang Jianwei/Xinhua via Getty Images)
The White House said Trump is committed to making “American leadership in space great again,” noting his first-term push to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and his efforts to deregulate the U.S. space industry. But officials declined to comment on a timeline for the mission or on China’s steady progress.
“Being first and beating China to the moon matters because it sets the rules of the road,” Sean Duffy, Transportation secretary and acting NASA administrator, told The Times. “We’re committed to doing this right — safely, peacefully, and ahead of strategic competitors — because American leadership on the moon secures our future in space.”
The success of the Artemis program, Duffy said, is about ensuring the United States leads in space for generations to come. “Those who lead in space lead on Earth,” he added.
NASA officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly, expressed concern that while leadership on the Artemis program has remained relatively stable, talent on robotics and in other key areas has left the agency at a critical time in the race, with potentially less than two years to go before China launches its first robotic mission to the south pole — a scout, of sorts, for a manned landing to follow.
A proposal to cut NASA research funding by roughly 47% has gripped officials there with doubt, jeopardizing a sense of job security at the agency and destabilizing a talent pipeline that could prove critical to success.
In the 1960s, the federal government increased spending on NASA to 4.4% of GDP to secure victory in the first space race.
“There’s too much uncertainty,” one NASA official said, raising the specter of the Trump administration impounding funds for the agency even if Congress continues to fund it.
Inside NASA headquarters, Hubbard said, “the feeling right now is terrified uncertainty — everyone is walking on eggshells.”
“They’re treading water,” he added. “People want to be given clear direction, and they’re not getting it.”
A Chinese Smart Dragon-3 rocket carrying satellites lifts off from sea on Sept. 9.
(VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
China’s long march gets closer
Beijing conducted a series of tests over the last several weeks viewed in Washington as crucial milestones for China on its journey to the moon.
A launch of its Lanyue lander, equipped to carry two taikonauts to the lunar surface, “validated” its landing and takeoff system, state media reported. Two subsequent tests of China’s Long March 10, a super-heavy lift rocket designed to jump-start the mission, were a “complete success,” according to the China Manned Space Agency.
Unlike in the United States, China’s manned space flight program is housed within its military.
“We have seen them steadily progress on all of the various pieces that they are going to need,” said Dean Cheng, senior advisor to the China program at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
“You need a vehicle to launch, because current rockets simply don’t have enough throw-weight. They’re testing the lander to carry astronauts to the surface,” Cheng said. “These are key pieces, and significant advances — this is a brand new rocket and a lunar lander with new technology.”
China initially set a goal for its manned mission by 2035, but has since moved up its plans, an expression of confidence from Beijing and an unusual break from typical party protocol. Now, China aims not only to have completed that mission, but to begin establishing an International Lunar Research Station on its surface, in conjunction with Russia, by 2030.
They are expected to target the south pole.
“There’s room for two powers under schemes of coordination, but there’s not room in an uncoordinated environment. There can easily be a competition for resources,” said Thomas González Roberts, an assistant professor of international affairs and aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Landing and takeoff of spacecraft on the moon will kick up lunar dust and rocks, risking the safety of astronauts on the ground and sensitive equipment across a base site — considerations that are likely driving Beijing’s strategy to get there first. Those enjoying the benefits of first arrival could set up generous routes for rovers, equipment at dig sites for deposits, telecommunication assets, and even a nuclear reactor to assert a large area of domain.
Since his first term, Trump and his aides have sought to avoid a showdown on the lunar surface, drafting a new set of international rules to govern an otherwise untamed frontier. The Artemis Accords “set out a practical set of principles to guide space exploration,” according to the State Department. President Biden embraced and extended the initiative, growing the list of signatories to 56 nations.
But China is not one of them, prohibited by Congress during the Obama era from cooperating with the United States in space after attempting to steal U.S. technology on intercontinental ballistic missiles and thermonuclear weapons. Instead, Beijing has recruited a small list of countries to join its lunar base program, including Russia, Venezuela, Pakistan, Egypt, Nicaragua, Belarus and South Africa.
“I don’t think there will be extreme congestion on the moon, but if you really define an area of interest — and there is that, with these peaks of eternal light next to permanently shadowed regions — you could manufacture congestion,” Roberts added.
“How do you benefit from obfuscation?” he asked. “If you’re the first arrival, you spread yourself out.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from launch pad 40 at Cape Canaveral, carrying Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft toward the International Space Station.
(Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The promise and burden of Musk’s Starship
Last month, Duffy warned NASA staff that the Trump administration suspects Beijing is planning to deliver a nuclear reactor to power a long-term presence at its lunar base by 2029.
The move, Duffy said, could allow China to “declare a keep-out zone, which would significantly inhibit the United States from establishing a planned Artemis presence if not there first.” He ordered the agency to collect proposals by October on delivering a U.S. reactor to the surface no later than that year.
The administration’s success relies on a man whose relationship with Trump has crashed spectacularly to Earth.
Starship, a super heavy-lift launch vehicle produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is the rocket Trump is relying on to accomplish the Artemis mission. Yet repeated setbacks in the Starship program have raised alarm at NASA over its fundamental constitution. A concerning series of tests have already delayed the U.S. manned launch, known as Artemis III, toward the end of Trump’s term.
Last month, in its 10th test flight, the rocket finally succeeded in a suborbital mission. But “Starship has yet to reach orbit,” Hubbard said, “and once it reaches orbit, they’ve got to demonstrate microgravity transfer of cryogenic propellant.”
“That’s something that’s never been done before,” he added. “So to say that they’ll be ready to do all of that in two years is a real stretch.”
Setbacks are common course in the history of the U.S. space program. But the success of China’s recent tests has shown the Trump administration that NASA and its partners have run out of time for further delays.
Duffy said that Artemis II, a manned mission to orbit the moon, will take place early next year, overcoming a separate set of design flaws that faced Lockheed Martin’s Orion spacecraft. Artemis III would keep astronauts on the surface for more than a week and deliver payloads to help begin the foundation of a base.
Whether the Trump administration will commit to the funding and leadership necessary for the mission is an open question. The White House declined to say who within the West Wing is leading the effort. Trump has not named a permanent NASA administrator for Senate confirmation.
Success on the moon is meant to provide a testing ground and a launching pad for more ambitious, challenging manned missions to Mars. But Trump’s commitment to those ventures are equally in doubt. The administration has proposed canceling funds for a landmark program decades in the making to return samples from the red planet, despite a NASA announcement last week revealed it had discovered signs of ancient Martian life.
“I’ve been on the inside of it — you waste enormous amounts of time just trying to find workarounds to get funding in to stay on schedule,” Hubbard said. “If you really, really want to beat the Chinese, give NASA the funding and some stability — because you’re not going to beat them if every day, week or month, there’s a different direction, a different budget, a different administrator.
“And China may still win,” he said, adding: “It would be another claim that they’re the dominant power in the world.”
Sept. 9 (UPI) — NASA invited the public on Tuesday to grab a boarding pass and be a part of the space agency’s test flight of its Artemis II mission set to launch four astronauts into orbit next year.
Officials at the U.S. space agency NASA said its public effort to involve civilians in the orbital venture around the moon and back in the Artemis test mission flight means individual spots for “Send Your Name with Artemis II” need to be claimed before January 21.
The Artemis II program is a “key test flight in our effort to return humans to the moon’s surface and build toward future missions to Mars,” according to Lori Glaze, NASA’s acting associate director for exploration systems development based in the nation’s capital.
NASA is prepping for its 10-day Artemis II 1 mission next year that will send a crew of four astronauts around the moon in the bid to prep for future crewed landings on Earth’s neighboring satellite and beyond.
Notably, Artemis II will carry the first woman and person of color to the lunar surface in what has been described by NASA as a so-called “Golden Age of innovation and exploration.”
America’s NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are set to lift off no later than April aboard the Orion spacecraft and its space launch system rocket as the first crewed flight under NASA’s Artemis campaign.
“And it’s also an opportunity to inspire people across the globe and to give them an opportunity to follow along as we lead the way in human exploration deeper into space,” Glaze said in a statement.
NASA’s “send your name” initiative for the Artemis space mission with allow a person to send an individual name on an SD card along with the four-person crew as they test their rocket for critical hardware systems required for deep space exploration.
And, on return to Earth, participants can download their personalized inscribed boarding pass as a collectable.
“Your name could be flying to the Moon!” Canada’s space agency posted Tuesday on X as it called out for virtual crew members to fly alongside CSA’s Hansen on Orion.
NASA officials — who’ve assigned both English and Spanish sign-up portals — have called it yet “another step” toward new U.S.-crewed moon surface missions on the way toward ultimately sending the first American astronauts to Mars for the first time.
On Monday, NASA (Florida’s Kennedy Space Center seen in April) said its annual public Lunabotic challenge is one of several student challenges related to Artemis, and that next year’s seeks mechanical robots with an ability to construct berms out of lunar regolith on the Moon’s surface. File Photo by Joe Marino/UPI | License Photo
Sept. 8 (UPI) — NASA on Monday announced its 2026 Lunabotics challenge that seeks a team or person to create a robot able to move about and build things on the moon’s surface.
The challenge comes as the space agency gears up for future lunar activity as part of its Artemis program.
NASA officials said its annual challenge — held since 2010 — is one of several student challenges associated with Artemis, and that next year’s event seeks mechanical robots with an ability to construct berms out of lunar regolith by using loose, fragmental material found on the moon’s surface.
“We are excited to continue the Lunabotics competition for universities as NASA develops new moon-to-Mars technologies for the Artemis program,” Robert Mueller, senior technologist at NASA, said in a statement.
Officials at America’s space agency said berms will be critical during lunar missions as blast protection during landings and launches. They added that, among other uses, berms also will play a role in shading for cryogenic propellant tank farms and radiation shielding around nuclear power plants.
“Excavating and moving regolith is a fundamental need to build infrastructure on the moon and Mars, and this competition creates 21st century skills in the future workforce,” said Mueller, also co-founder and chief judge of the Lunabotics competition.
NASA said the competition will provide hands-on experiences in computer coding, engineering, manufacturing, fabricating and other crucial tech skills.
Officials will notify selected teams to begin the challenge, the top 10 teams will be invited to bring their robot creations to the final competition in Florida in May at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Artemis Arena.
The team scoring the most points will receive the Lunabotics Grand Prize and participate in an exhibition-style event at NASA Kennedy.
An in-person qualifying event will be held May 12-17 at the University of Central Florida’s Space Institute’s Lab in Orlando.
The NASA challenge launched Monday comes after last week’s announcement that a separate NASA competition is seeking a special space wheel in a design by an American inventor or team.
Meanwhile, interested participants can submit applications via NASA’s portal starting Monday and find other information in the challenge guidebook.
It’s been seven months since I looked up from my desk here in The Times’ El Segundo office and saw smoke roiling over the horizon.
The sky behind the billowing dove-gray clouds was still blue and clear. Across the county, people who would not live to see the next sunrise still watered their plants and chatted with neighbors and went about their business. I snapped a photo of the Palisades fire, unaware that I was looking at an entity already in the process of changing Los Angeles irrevocably.
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The Eaton fire erupted hours later. By the following afternoon there was no distinction between smoke and sky, just that acrid, asphyxiating gray that made eyes water and chests tighten throughout Los Angeles County.
For days, we breathed in each other’s lives. Flames took the contents of our homes — photographs, plastic toys, car batteries, attic insulation, every coat of paint and varnish applied across the decades — and reduced them to microscopic particles that wafted across the region, went into our windpipes, leached into our blood and settled in our brains.
At work I wrote obituaries, sorted through the medical examiner’s database, and listened to grieving people describe their loved ones’ finest qualities and heartbreaking final hours.
A total of 31 people died as a direct result of injuries sustained in the Palisades and Eaton fires. The remains of the last known victim, 74-year-old Juan Francisco Espinoza, were discovered just weeks ago in the wreckage of his Altadena home.
Smoke from the Palisades fire, seen from the window of the L.A. Times’ office in El Segundo, on Jan. 7.
(Corinne Purtill / Los Angeles Times)
The disaster’s true toll is likely far higher. Just this week, a research team compared the number of deaths Los Angeles County logged between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1 to those counted in previous, non-pandemic years. This year’s count was much higher than expected. Researchers estimate that the fires led to the deaths of an additional 440 people in January alone, through interrupted healthcare and hazardous air quality.
It’s the beginning of a long reckoning with the potential health consequences of the toxic pollutants that the fires unleashed into our air, soil and water.
It will almost certainly be impossible to attribute any individual case of cancer, dementia or cardiovascular failure — to name a few of the health issues associated with exposure to wildfire smoke — to a person’s proximity to the L.A. fires.
Similarly, it’s impossible to pinpoint the degree to which climate change exacerbates any individual natural disaster. But it’s highly likely that a chaotic climate contributed to the intensity of January’s firestorms.
Two extraordinarily wet years produced an explosion of vegetation that dried out over an unusually warm summer and unusually dry winter. The region was a tinderbox, and when the Santa Ana winds hit with the force of a hurricane, ignitions turned quickly into uncontrolled catastrophes.
These itty-bitty particles of soot, measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter, are fine enough to cross the barriers between the outer branches of our lungs and the blood, and the blood and the brain.
Such particles can originate from vehicle exhaust, construction projects, campfires and even volcanic eruptions. But wildfires are a particularly insidious source.
Compared with other sources, wildfire smoke “contains a higher fraction of ultrafine particles — particles 25 times smaller than PM2.5 — that can move directly from the nose into the brain, potentially damaging brain cells and eventually leading to dementia,” said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington.
“The other thing that differs is how people are exposed to wildfire smoke. Unlike other sources of PM2.5, [in which] exposure might be relatively constant throughout the year, people are often exposed to a few days of extreme wildfire smoke annually,” Casey said. “Think about it this way: it might be fine to drink one glass of wine per day, but some of these wildfire smoke events are like drinking four bottles of wine in an evening, which can overwhelm the body’s defense and harm health.”
That punch may land particularly heavy when the smoke comes from urban fires like January’s disaster.
Casey pointed to a paper that came out earlier this year looking at the relative toxicity of different types of wildfire smoke.
That research team found that smoke originating from fires that burned buildings had higher concentrations of lead, nickel and other carcinogenic substances than smoke from fires that burned primarily organic material.
After examining air pollution data captured at 700 air quality monitors over a 15 year-period, the researchers found that the share of pollutants that could be attributed to wildfire “significantly increased over time,” they wrote, “with wildfire-attributed concentrations of multiple carcinogenic metals significantly higher by the end of our sample.”
The team estimated that exposure to wildfire smoke may have caused 47 additional cases of cancer in the U.S. between 2006 and 2020 that would not have otherwise developed.
Momentous as a cancer diagnosis is for any individual, in the context of the national population this is a minuscule and statistically insignificant increase in context, they pointed out — there are more than 1 million new cancer diagnoses in the U.S. per year.
But most of that wildfire smoke was generated by “traditional” wildfires that mostly burn trees, brush and plants. We don’t know what the burden will be from increasing exposure to incinerated batteries, machinery, plastic and cars, said Emma Krasovich Southworth, a doctoral candidate at Stanford and co-author of the study.
“Given that we’re seeing more urban fires . . . we would expect that this risk to public health could change,” she said. “Even though [wildfire smoke] hasn’t added a significant cancer burden in the past, that’s not to say it won’t in the future.”
As anyone affected by January’s fires in any capacity knows, disasters of this magnitude also create an enormous amount of acute and chronic stress, which itself alters brain structure and function.
In a paper exploring the potential health effects of the fires, Casey and colleagues noted multiple ways that the upheaval and displacement they caused could contribute to ongoing mental health issues.
“Those evacuating face extreme stress and impacts on mental health, even years after the events,” they wrote. “Even when homes are not damaged or destroyed, evacuation disrupts multiple dimensions of people’s lives, including work, education, community gatherings, and health care access.”
This column looks often at the economic costs and consequences of a changing climate. There is also a toll our brains and bodies, a physical burden we all take on when the environment falls apart.
L.A.’s fires have reshaped the city. It is also possible that they have triggered changes in our very cells whose consequences we can’t yet see, and will become apparent to us long after the last lot has been cleared.
“I think [the fires have] the potential to be devastating to human health, especially over the long term,” Krasovich Southworth said. “We might see the immediate uptick of certain things that we know happen when exposed to [fire], like asthma or other respiratory issues. But I think the longer-term exposures to these chemicals . . . could be really devastating to the community.”
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
Two scenes. Two storytellers. Two visions for a climate-altered American West.
On an overcast spring morning, I hopped a low metal fence off a lonely dirt road in the Nevada desert, following botanist Naomi Fraga. She assured me she’d done this before — these were public lands, after all. We were 100 miles east of Yosemite, out in the middle of nowhere, except I’d long since learned there’s no such thing as nowhere. The desert may look barren, but its mountains and valleys teem with life. And precious metals.
Fraga led me up a small hill, the soil chalky-white and rich with lithium, a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. We moved slowly, not wanting to trample any endangered wildflowers.
Wait, were those the flowers? The Tiehm’s buckwheat I’d come hundreds of miles to see?
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“Very tiny,” Fraga confirmed. “When it flowers, its flower stalks might come about 4 or 5 inches high.”
“It snows here in this elevation zone,” she added, roughly 6,000 feet above sea level. “It’s a very cold desert, and when it’s cold, Tiehm’s buckwheat is just lying in wait, waiting for spring.”
For a flower that’s spurred high-stakes litigation, detailed scientific study and global news coverage, it was pretty ugly, at least in its dormant winter state. The clumps of gray-green buckwheat looked almost like mold.
Clumps of Tiehm’s buckwheat near the planned Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine.
(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)
For Fraga, the flower’s current appearance is beside the point. Tiehm’s buckwheat doesn’t grow anywhere else in the world — just here, across three square miles of Esmeralda County. She’s enthralled by its role in an ecosystem of pollinators and bighorn sheep. She’s awestruck by its ability to survive winter snow and 120-degree heat.
“I just have an enormous amount of respect for the organisms that make this their home,” she said. “I feel like it brings for a reverence for harsh living, and ways in which life will find a way.”
The question now: Can Tiehm’s buckwheat survive a lithium mine?
Fraga doesn’t think so. Bernard Rowe disagrees.
The day after I met Fraga, Rowe took me to the same area. We drove down the dirt road past the metal fence, to a spectacular basin where his employer, Australia-based Ioneer, is preparing to dig for lithium.
“The good thing is, this is a natural amphitheater, and it is hidden from really everywhere,” Rowe said. “You’ve got the ring of volcanic rocks that completely surrounds this basin.”
Sight lines don’t matter to an endangered flower. But contrary to claims made by conservationists, Rowe said the Rhyolite Ridge mine won’t drive Tiehm’s buckwheat to extinction. He noted that mining activities won’t touch any subpopulations of Tiehm’s buckwheat — although the quarry could come as close as a dozen feet.
“We had to make sure we put buffer zones. We had to map all the plants,” he said.
So who’s right?
Bernard Rowe, managing director at Ioneer, discusses the company’s planned lithium mine in Esmeralda County, Nevada.
(Jonathan Shifflett)
It would be easy to make the company look like the bad guy. After all, here’s a profit-seeking foreign corporation seeking to exploit America’s public lands in the name of environmental progress. Potentially at the expense of an endangered species. With only a band of hardy activists standing in the way.
It’s a good story. Arguably an accurate story. And yet…
And yet the climate crisis makes everything complicated. To phase out oil and natural gas — whose combustion fills the air with deadly pollution and fuels devastating storms, wildfires and heat waves — we’ll need enormous amounts of lithium, for electric vehicle batteries and solar energy storage to keep the lights on after dark. Most of the world’s lithium is currently produced in Australia and China, and at destructive evaporation ponds in Chile.
Those geopolitical dynamics help explain why lithium mining has garnered bipartisan support even as President Trump kills other clean energy projects. The Biden administration approved Rhyolite Ridge last year, then backed the developer with a $996-million loan. The Trump administration has let both decisions stand.
Already, Rowe estimated, the U.S. consumes 100,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year for electric car batteries.
“By the time you add in grid batteries, hand tools, recreational vehicles, cellphones … it will soon be hundreds of thousands of tons,” he said. “And into the future, it’ll be 1 million tons of domestic demand.”
Let’s say the Rhyolite Ridge’s critics are right, and the mine would, in fact, annihilate Tiehm’s buckwheat. Is that a reasonable price to pay for ditching oil-burning cars and shutting down gas-fired power plants?
The answer might depend on your vantage point.
Botanist Naomi Fraga examines Tiem’s buckwheat on a hill near the planned site of the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine.
(Jonathan Shifflett)
Take Fraga. She was born and raised in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley and is now a botany professor at Claremont Graduate University. She started doing research in Nevada a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic. She sees Rhyolite Ridge as part of a landscape so unique it might be a national monument were it in California.
Rowe, meanwhile, grew up in an Australian farm town. He was inspired to study geology by a university lecturer’s tales of travel and adventure, which led him to the mining industry. He’s spent 20 years splitting his time between Sydney and Nevada, where he helped identify the value in Rhyolite Ridge’s mineral deposits.
Part of the value is lithium. The rest is boron, a durable, heat-resistant metalloid. Rowe could riff for hours about the vast array of products that require boron, including steel alloys, carpet fibers, car parts, wind turbine magnets and many types of glass, including cookware, windshields, TV screens and thermal insulation.
Right now, Turkey is the world’s top boron producer by far. Rhyolite Ridge was a rare find.
“Most other metal deposits — copper, gold — they can be quite young, in terms of a few million years old. Or they can be hundreds of millions, even a billion years old,” Rowe said. “You don’t find old boron deposits.”
For Rowe, Rhyolite Ridge is treasure buried in plain sight. For Fraga, it’s just the latest example of callous outsiders attempting to exploit Nevada’s public lands — a history that began with silver mining and continues with housing development, solar farms and nuclear waste storage. Nevada is already home to America’s only active lithium mine, not far from Rhyolite Ridge. The Thacker Pass mine is also under construction near the Oregon border.
Angelenos driving electric vehicles ought to think about how their choices affect Nevada, Fraga suggested.
“There’s a real tension there, where we need to avert the worst of the climate crisis. But in doing so, we can cause real harm to ecosystems,” she said.
So how do we resolve that tension?
Tiehm’s buckwheat in bloom.
(Naomi Fraga)
I put off writing this column for three months because I didn’t have a good answer. How could I defend the mine when it might doom an endangered species? Yet how could I condemn it when we need lithium, and when so few large-scale clean energy projects don’t face environmental conflicts?
As far as the sparring parties are concerned, the facts speak for themselves. Ioneer points to a biological opinion from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluding that its mine is “not likely to jeopardize the continued existence” of Tiehm’s buckwheat or “result in the destruction or adverse modification of its critical habitat.”
Conservationists counter that when the Fish and Wildlife Service declared the flower an endangered species in 2022, the agency described “mineral exploration and development” as one of the “greatest threats” to the flower. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Shoshone Defense Project and Great Basin Resource Watch sued federal officials over their approval of the mine last year, contending they rushed the environmental review.
It’s possible we’ll never know who’s right. Ioneer is scrambling to secure new funding after the South African firm Sibanye-Stillwater — which was supposed to invest $490 million — backed out this year amid falling global lithium prices. Ioneer said this month it wouldn’t start construction until at least March. If and when the company is ready to start digging, the groups in the lawsuit could ask the judge to block construction.
But whatever happens at Rhyolite Ridge, these types of questions aren’t going away — especially in the American West, where public lands have traditionally supplied big cities with energy, water and food. We’ll need to be more thoughtful than ever about how we use land. We’ll need to get comfortable evaluating trade-offs.
In an ideal world, we’d never have to choose between lithium mines and lovely flowers. Or at least, we’d find ways to resolve these types of conflicts amicably — and quickly, because climate chaos is coming fast.
Sometimes it’s possible. Alas, sometimes we’ll have to choose.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
Planned for 14 square miles in Fresno County, the project will provide up to 1,150 megawatts of solar energy and 4,600 megawatts-hours of battery storage. Dubbed the Darden project, it should be able to power 850,000 homes after dark. The developer, Intersect Power, will pay hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes over time.
And because Darden will be built on retired farmland in an area running low on water, rather than pristine public lands in the desert, there are few environmental conflicts. No Joshua trees to chop down or endangered tortoises to displace. An easy place to build renewable energy and slow the climate crisis.
So why are many farmers in water-scarce parts of California fighting the solar industry?
State lawmakers are under pressure from Big Ag to kill or rewrite legislation that would make it easier to convert farmland to solar production. The Legislature rejected a similar bill last year, despite looming regulations that will require Central Valley farmers to pump less groundwater.
In southeastern California, meanwhile, the powerful Imperial Irrigation District — which controls more Colorado River water than the entire state of Arizona — voted this month to oppose further solar development on Imperial Valley farmland, even as a climate-fueled megadrought drains the river’s major reservoirs.
Again, why are farmers gumming up the clean energy transition?
“Agricultural land is very productive, and it’s something that we want to protect,” said J.B. Hamby, vice chair of the Imperial Irrigation District’s board of directors. “There’s ample opportunity to develop solar in other places.”
“One in 6 jobs in the Imperial Valley is directly tied to agriculture,” he added.
The California Aqueduct runs between farmland and a solar plant in Kern County, carrying water south from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Big Ag groups are making a similar argument in the Central Valley, where Assembly Bill 1156 would boost solar by weakening a law called the Williamson Act, which is designed to keep lands in crop production.
“The bill removes that smart approach to land-use decisions, where you’re [putting] solar on the least-productive agricultural lands,” said Peter Ansel, director of policy advocacy for the California Farm Bureau Federation.
On the surface, those talking points sound fair. But they’re not the whole story.
State officials need to get real about the enormous amounts of renewable energy we still need to build to replace deadly, destructive fossil fuels — an estimated 60 gigawatts of solar, wind and battery capacity in the next decade (and twice that much by 2045). For context, California has never used more than 52 gigawatts of electricity at one time before. The huge jump is partly due to the expected rise in electric vehicles and data centers.
Thus far, many of the biggest solar plants in the western U.S. have been built on public lands in the desert, where the Obama and Biden administrations encouraged renewable energy. But conservation activists have increasingly raised concerns over harm to wildlife habitat and endangered species, slowing development.
To Shannon Eddy — executive director of the Large-scale Solar Assn., a California trade group — promoting more solar on farmland is an obvious response. That’s one reason her group is sponsoring AB 1156.
“We have to add more clean energy to the grid than we have ever added in the history of the electricity grid,” she said. “And somehow we have to find a way to look at this through a shared lens, understanding that if we are not able to reduce climate emissions by 50% globally by 2030, we’re toast.”
I wouldn’t go quite so far. If we fail to cut climate pollution nearly in half by 2030 — which scientists say is needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the world won’t suddenly end.
But heat waves, wildfires, storms and droughts will keep getting worse. Which is why we should do everything we can to avoid that outcome. Like trading some productive farmland for some badly needed clean energy.
A smoldering home during the Eaton fire on Jan. 8.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
The details of AB 1156 are complicated, but the results would be simple.
Across California, 16 million acres — about half the state’s farms and ranches — are protected by the Williamson Act. The 1965 law offers lower property taxes for landowners who agree to keep their holdings in agricultural use or open space. For a grower to renege on a Williamson Act contract — for instance, if they want to sell to a home developer — they have to pay a big fee, or else wait out the duration of their contract.
It’s a good deal for farmers — and, historically, a good way to prevent suburban sprawl.
The problem arises when a solar company finds a farmer who wants to stop cultivating some or all of their lands, but those lands still have years remaining on a Williamson Act contract. Solar companies work on thin margins, and Williamson Act cancellation fees can derail otherwise viable projects. That’s especially true now that Congress and President Trump have eviscerated federal incentives for renewable energy.
AB 1156 would let growers in water-stressed areas suspend their contracts to enable solar development, without anyone paying the fee. The solar company would pay full property taxes. Local officials would need to sign off.
And again: If less water inevitably means lost farmland, why not incentivize solar?
“You’re going to be restoring revenue to not only the landowner, but also to the local economy,” Eddy said.
Conservation activist Kim Delfino, president of consulting firm Earth Advocacy, often finds herself at loggerheads with the solar industry over large-scale projects in the desert. But she and one of her clients, the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife, support AB 1156 — even though there are burrowing owls and a handful of other sensitive critters that have come to depend on agricultural lands.
“There’s no free lunch,” Delfino told me. “Anytime you put a project somewhere, it’s probably going to have some kind of environmental or habitat impacts.”
And that’s the crux of the challenge: There are lots of reasons to say no to clean energy in your community, even as we all collectively need it. Change is hard. It’s no surprise that farmers embracing solar are being drowned out by their neighbors who want to preserve agrarian communities as they’ve existed for a century.
Farmworkers weed rows of romaine lettuce outside Holtville, Calif., in the Imperial Valley.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
If California wants to soften opposition to solar, it should try to support farmworkers who see solar as a threat to their livelihoods — even if climate-driven water shortages would have threatened their jobs regardless.
Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San José State, recently co-wrote a paper on solar and environmental justice in the Imperial Valley. He said state officials should require solar companies to pay for more “community benefits” to make up for lost jobs, but not such high fees that companies stop building.
“It’s not a huge, profitable industry. They struggle,” Mulvaney acknowledged.
It’s hard to know what the future holds for Imperial County, which already has 13,000 acres of solar on farmland. The county supervisors are responsible for approving solar projects, not the irrigation district.
Here’s hoping the supervisors recognize that some change is inevitable. Even if they don’t approve every project, they could prod developers toward marginal farmland with lower-quality soil.
In the Central Valley, conditions are more likely to hinge on AB 1156, which passed the Assembly last month and is moving through the Senate. Lawmakers should send it to Gov. Gavin Newsom despite opposition from the farm bureau and other agricultural groups that are demanding amendments.
The farm bureau has argued that letting landowners out of their Williamson Act contracts except under extremely narrow circumstances would be unfair. Were it not for the climate crisis, that argument might have merit.
The thing is, there is a climate crisis. California should act like it.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
July 22 (UPI) — NASA’s TRACERS mission is set to launch on Tuesday on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from California.
The TRACERS mission aims to “help understand magnetic reconnection and its effects in Earth’s atmosphere.”
The mission’s launch window opens at 11:13 a.m. PDT with a 57-minute window from the Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Space Launch Complex 4 East.
“About eight minutes after liftoff, Falcon 9’s first stage will land on SpaceX’s Landing Zone 4 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California,” said a release from SpaceX. “There is the possibility that residents of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura counties may hear one or more sonic booms during the landing, but what residents experience will depend on weather and other conditions.”
NASA will also send three payloads, the Athena EPIC, the Polylingual Experimental Terminal and the Relativistic Electron Atmospheric Loss with the mission.
There is also a backup opportunity for the launch on Wednesday at the same time.
July 21 (UPI) — Several hundred current and former NASA employees, including at least four retired astronauts, backed a letter that opposes the Trump administration’s significant cuts to the federal space agency.
The letter, which included 131 signatures and 156 unnamed ones out of “fear of retaliation,” is titled “The Voyager Declaration.” It is named after the two NASA spacecraft exploring space when they launched in 1977 from Florida.
The retired astronauts who signed the letter include Cady Coleman, Steve Swanson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger and John Herrington.
Scientists outside NASA, including 20 Nobel Prize winners, also have given their support for the agency that was found in 1958 before the first unmanned satellite launched.
The letter was addressed to Sean Duffy, who was named interim NASA administrator on Juy 10 and continues to serve as Transportation Secretary.
He replaced acting NASA Administrator Janet Petro, a long-time agency employee.
“In light of your recent appointment as Interim NASA Administrator, we bring to your attention recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission,” the letter reads.
They urged Duffy to oppose a 24% budget reduction and 31% workforce cuts as proposed by the Trump administration.
Out of the 17,000-plus NASA employees, 2,600 have lost their jobs, according to Politicio. And at least $117 million in NASA grants already have been canceled.
Congress sets U.S. spending.
Workers at other federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency, have penned similar letters opposing cutbacks.
“The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire,” the letter says.
The signers of the letter cited wasteful efforts affecting the workforce.
“Major programmatic shifts at NASA must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully,” the letter reads. “Instead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA’s workforce.
“We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources. These cuts are arbitrary and have been enacted in defiance of congressional appropriations law.”
The letter lays out several things on which the letter writers say, “we dissent”:
Changes to NASA’s Technical Authority
Closing of missions appropriated by Congress
“Indiscriminate” cuts to NASA science and aeronautics research
“Non-strategic staffing reductions”
Canceling of NASA participation in international missions
Termination of contracts and grants “unrelated to performance”
Elimination of programs for supporting NASA’s workforce
The Technical Authority was established in wake of the 2003 Columbia shuttler disaster that killed seven astronauts. It allows workers in all levels of the agency to voice concern outside a usual chain of command.
The letter was dedicated to the Columbia astronauts, as well as Gus Grissom, Ed White And Roger Chaffee, who died aboard Apollo 1 at the launch pad in 1967, and seven killed in the 1987 Challenger explosion.
“Their legacies underpin every conversation about our shared commitment to safety and dissenting opinions at NASA,” the letter reads.
Monica Gorman, an operations research analyst at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told The New York Times: “We’re afraid of retaliation.”
She added: “I’m already at risk of losing my job, and I’d rather speak out and try to save something at NASA, rather than just hide under my desk until I get laid off. But I am scared.”
Ella Kaplan, who also works at Goddard, as a contractor for website administratipon, signed the letter.
Kaplan told Nature.com she doesn’t expect Duffy to read the entire letter but the declaration is “about getting our dissent out to the public and saying, ‘Hey — this is what’s happened at NASA, and this is not OK.'”
NASA spokesman Bethany Steven told Nature.com that NASA is not interested in sustaining “lower-priority missions.”
“We must revisit what’s working and what’s not so that we can inspire the American people again and win the space race,” she said.
Makenzie Lystrup, Goddard’s direct since 2023, resigned, effective Aug. 1, after the letter was released, according to an internal email obtained by CNN.
NASA, with the retirement of the shuttle in 2011, mainly relies on SpaceX, a private company, to send astronauts to the International Space Station.
NASA is leading the Artemis program to send humans to the moon again in a few years. The agency is working with SpaceX, Blue Origin and Intuitive Machines as well as foreign public agencies.
NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has officially begun taxi tests, marking the first time this one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft has moved under its own power
NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has officially begun taxi tests
NASA is testing a new aircraft that could pave the way for a new era of supersonic air travel by addressing an issue at the heart of Concorde’s commercial failure.
The dream of a ‘son of Concorde‘ capable of whisking passengers from New York to London in under four hours is edging closer to reality.
NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has officially begun taxi tests, a significant milestone as this unique experimental plane moves under its own power for the first time.
On 10 July, NASA test pilot Nils Larson, alongside the X-59 team comprising NASA and Lockheed Martin staff, carried out the craft’s inaugural low-speed taxi test at the U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California.
This taxiing phase signals the final ground test sequence before the X-59’s maiden flight. In the upcoming weeks, the aircraft will incrementally boost its speed, culminating in a high-speed taxi test that will bring it tantalisingly close to lift-off.
During these initial low-speed trials, engineering and flight teams observed the X-59’s performance on the tarmac, ensuring essential systems like steering and braking are operating correctly. These evaluations are crucial for confirming the aircraft’s stability and control under various scenarios, instilling confidence in pilots and engineers that all systems are functioning optimally.
At the heart of NASA’s Quesst mission, the X-59 aims to revolutionise quiet supersonic travel by transforming the traditionally loud sonic boom into a more subdued “thump.”
This is considered key to the commercial success of any supersonic air travel. Crashing through the sound barrier causes a huge bang that has big consequences for those on the ground. During a 1965 test of the original Concorde over Oklahoma city by the US Air Force, hundreds of reports of smashed windows were made.
The potential to cause this kind of disruption meant that Concorde could only fly certain routes at supersonic, meaning no high-speed flights over land. This crushed the business case for the aircraft in the US as cities such as Los Angeles and New York could not be linked up effectively.
Guy Gratton, associate professor of aviation and the environment at Cranfield University, told the Mirror how NASA’s new ‘quiet’ tech is causing is a huge amount of excitement in the industry.
“From what I’ve been able to read, it does work. As a supersonic aircraft flies, every leading part of the aircraft creates a shockwave, and that shockwave creates a sonic boom. The NASA tech has shaped the aircraft so as the shockwaves move away from the plane in flight, they interact with each other and cancel each other out,” he explained.
The X-59 is expected to reach speeds of Mach 1.5, or roughly 990 mph (1,590 km/h), which could potentially cut the London to New York flight time down to approximately 3 hours and 44 minutes – a significant reduction from the usual 7-8 hour journey.
In 2023, NASA explored the feasibility of supersonic passenger air travel on aircraft capable of reaching speeds between Mach 2 and Mach 4 (1,535-3,045 mph). Information collected from the X-59 will be shared with U.S. and international regulators to help establish new, data-driven noise standards for supersonic commercial flights over land.
In an early episode of the TV series “Lost,” the plane crash survivors stranded on a mysterious island are running low on water. A fight breaks out, until emerging leader Jack Shephard admonishes everyone to work together.
“If we can’t live together, we’re gonna die alone,” he says.
California lawmakers contemplating our climate future ought to take that lesson to heart.
Senate Bill 540 would help establish a regional electricity market capable of tying together the American West’s three dozen independent power grids. Supporters say it would smooth the flow of solar and wind power from the sunny, windy landscapes where they’re produced most cheaply to the cities where they’re most needed. It would help California keep the lights on without fossil fuels, and without driving up utility bills.
That may sound straightforward, but the bill has bitterly divided environmentalists. Welcome to the Wild West of energy policy.
Some consider regional power-trading a crucial market-based tool for accelerating climate progress. Others see it as a plot by greedy energy companies to enrich themselves.
Those divides didn’t stop the Senate from unanimously passing SB 540. But amendments demanded by skeptical lawmakers are now threatening to derail the bill in the Assembly — even as Gov. Gavin Newsom threw his weight behind the concept Wednesday.
Critics warn that SB 540 would result in California yielding control of its power grid to out-of-state officials and the Trump administration, who could force Californians to pay for coal-fired electricity from Utah and Wyoming. They also worry about market manipulation driving up electric rates.
Those fears are understandable. I also think they’re misguided.
California by itself can’t stop the planet from heating up. The Golden State’s decades-long campaign to slow the wildfires, floods and heat waves of the climate crisis has been predicated on the conviction that eventually, other states and nations will follow along — even oil bastions and MAGA hothouses.
In other words: If we can’t live together, we’re gonna die alone.
Fortunately, even in the wake of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gutting clean energy incentives, solar and wind power are still cheaper than planet-warming coal and fossil gas. Which is why Michael Wara, a Stanford energy and climate scholar, isn’t worried that SB 540 will leave Californians drowning in dirty power. In a regional market, solar and wind will usually outcompete coal and gas.
“Any energy source that requires fuel to operate is more expensive than an energy source that doesn’t,” he said.
The 20-megawatt Maricopa West solar project in California’s Kern County.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
California also needs to prove that a grid powered entirely by clean energy is affordable and reliable. The state’s rising electric rates are already a big concern. And although the grid has been stable the last few years, thanks to batteries that store solar for after dark, keeping the lights on with more and more renewables might get harder.
Regional market advocates make a strong case that interstate cooperation would help.
For instance, a market would help California more smoothly access Pacific Northwest hydropower, already a key energy source during heat waves. It would also give California easier access to low-cost winds from New Mexico and Wyoming. Best of all, that wind is often blowing strong just as the sun sets along the Pacific.
Another benefit: Right now, California often generates more solar than it can use during certain hours of the day, forcing solar farms to shut down — or pay other states to take the extra power. With a regional market, California could sell excess solar to other states, keeping utility bills down.
“This is about lowering costs,” said Robin Everett, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign.
When I wrote about a past regional market proposal in 2017, the Sierra Club was opposed. It believed a regional market would throw an economic lifeline to Utah and Wyoming coal plants owned by Warren Buffett’s PacifiCorp company by giving them access to new markets — including California — to sell their power.
Eight years later, things are different. High costs are driving coal toward extinction. Solar and wind cost even less. Sierra Club staff now say California should be less worried about opening new markets to coal and more worried about averting blackouts or high utility bills that could trigger an anti-renewables backlash.
“Otherwise we’re going to see more and more gas, and a push to keep coal online,” Everett said.
But here’s where the politics get tricky.
Although the Sierra Club endorsed the Pathways Initiative — the detailed regional market plan on which SB 540 is based — it hasn’t endorsed the bill. That’s because many of the club’s volunteer leaders still hate the idea.
They’re not alone.
SB 540’s opponents include the Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch and Consumer Watchdog. (Full disclosure: My father-in-law, an energy lawyer, has advocated against the bill.) Eight chapters of 350.org and 73 chapters of progressive group Indivisible stand opposed. So does the Environmental Working Group.
On the flip side, supporters include Climate Hawks Vote, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy, the Union of Concerned Scientists and two chapters of 350.org.
Loretta Lynch, who led the state’s Public Utilities Commission during the early-2000s energy crisis, thinks SB 540 would open the door for more market manipulation, giving energy companies legally sanctioned tools to thwart climate goals and force Californians to pay for expensive fossil fuels.
Her warnings have resonated with activists frustrated by California’s investor-owned utilities, which keep raising electric rates and recently helped persuade officials to slash rooftop solar incentives. Indeed, SB 540’s supporters include Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and trade groups for major power producers.
“They want no guardrails or limits on how they can fleece California,” Lynch said.
Montana’s coal-fired Colstrip power plant.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
It’s a compelling narrative. But most energy experts who have studied the bill aren’t convinced.
For one thing, electricity sales have changed dramatically since the energy crisis, with more oversight and fewer last-minute trades limiting the potential for shenanigans. Unlike with past regional market proposals, California would retain control of its grid operator, with only a few functions delegated to a regional entity. And California’s grid is already subject to federal regulation, meaning Trump could try undermining state policy at any time.
Labor attorney Marc Joseph, who helped lead the charge against previous regional market bills, described Lynch’s talking points as “good arguments against a thing that is no longer being proposed.”
“We’re in a different place because it’s a fundamentally different thing,” Joseph said.
Joseph represents the politically powerful International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. After years of fighting regional markets, IBEW is now a vocal supporter. What changed, Joseph said, is that SB 540 would safeguard state climate goals, thus making it a valuable tool to advance solar and wind farms — and create good-paying jobs.
Even with IBEW’s support, though, it’s not clear if SB 540 will reach Newsom’s desk.
To secure support in the Senate in May, Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), the bill’s author, added amendments to assuage concerns about California giving up too much control of its grid. Ironically, many of the bill’s key backers now say they’re opposed unless the amendments are removed or tweaked.
Why would they say that? Because California is the biggest electricity user in the West, and other states won’t join a regional market unless they’re confident California will participate — and the amendments would make it easier for the Golden State to bail. Out-of-state utilities don’t want to waste time and money committing themselves to a California-led market only to lose California, and thus many of the economic benefits.
That’s especially true because those utilities have another option. Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool, which operates the electric grid across much of the central U.S., is recruiting Western utilities to its own regional market. Already, utilities based in Arizona, Colorado and the Pacific Northwest have agreed to join.
Arkansas isn’t leading the West to a clean energy future. California can try — or it can close itself off to the world.
Living together is no guarantee. But dying alone is definitely worse.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill last year that could have led to reparations for Mexican American families forced from their homes in Chavez Ravine in the 1950s, few knew the Dodgers had weighed in.
Newsom’s explanation was brief. He supported making amends for the injustice that occurred when Los Angeles officials uprooted three communities, seizing land for a housing project that would ultimately fall through before selling it to the Dodgers to enable the team’s move from Brooklyn. But the governor didn’t like that the bill would create a state-level task force rather than a local commission.
“A task force to study the events that occurred should be established at the local level,” Newsom wrote.
But previously unreported records show that the Dodgers lobbied state officials on the bill — as did the baseball team’s previous owner, Frank McCourt, who still shares ownership of the Dodger Stadium parking lots. McCourt’s lobbyists at the time included a firm led by Newsom’s friend Jason Kinney, whose French Laundry birthday dinner Newsom infamously attended at the height of the pandemic.
The records show that the Dodgers and McCourt lobbied on Assembly Bill 1950 — but not what side they took, if any. Did they oppose the legislation? And if so, did that lead to Newsom’s veto? It’s hard to know, because neither the Dodgers nor McCourt responded to my requests for comment.
As for Newsom, a spokesperson told me the governor’s office wasn’t lobbied on the bill — despite McCourt’s real estate company reporting otherwise.
Whatever actually happened, the Dodgers’ involvement raises questions about what went on behind the scenes. The public deserves answers — especially now that President Trump’s immigration raids have placed the team in the political spotlight, forcing its owners to grapple with the political and cultural power they wield.
For nearly two weeks after federal agents began rounding up brown-skinned people across the region, the team refused to comment, despite its more-than-40%-Latino fan base. For many fans, the silence felt like a betrayal — particularly after the team’s recent visit with Trump. A Dodgers employee even told Latina musician Nezza not to sign the National Anthem in Spanish before a game. (She did it anyway.)
I’ll get back to the ICE raids and reparations bill shortly. But first, let’s note that this is hardly the first time that the Dodgers have hesitated to stand for social justice — despite being the franchise of Jackie Robinson.
Since last summer, 28,000 people have signed a petition urging the team to end its relationship with oil company Phillips 66, which advertises its 76 brand gasoline throughout Dodger Stadium. State officials have accused the oil giant of participating in a “decades-long campaign” to cover up the climate crisis — a crisis that affects everybody but is especially harmful to low-income families and people of color, including L.A.’s Latino communities.
A 76 gasoline ad above the right-field scoreboard at Dodger Stadium, seen during a July 4 game against the Astros.
(Kevork Djansezian / Los Angeles Times)
In March, California Senate Majority Leader Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) called on the Dodgers to drop Phillips 66 as a sponsor. In a letter to controlling owner Mark Walter, she pointed out that Angelenos breathe some of the nation’s most polluted air. She also alluded to the link between fossil fuels and more devastating wildfires.
“For decades, the Dodgers have been ahead of the curve. On issues from banning cigarette ads to making history by signing Jackie Robinson, this team has occupied a unique place in American sports,” Gonzalez wrote.
How have the Dodgers responded? At least publicly, they haven’t. Every time I’ve written about Phillips 66, they’ve declined to respond. I suspect they’re hoping the whole issue will just go away.
News flash: It’s not going away. Especially after the ICE raids.
To understand the connection between immigration and environmental justice, I’d recommend listening to Alicia Rivera. She’s an organizer with Communities for a Better Environment, and she’s spoken at rallies outside Dodger Stadium protesting Phillips 66. Even before Trump launched his harsh anti-immigrant crackdown last month, she was explaining how deportations and dirty air are part of the same system of injustices.
As drivers entered the Dodger Stadium parking lots before a game in May, she talked about her young grandson, and her fears over what kind of world he would inherit: How much worse would wildfires get? Would fossil-fueled weather disasters in other countries prompt even more refugees to flee to the U.S.?
“Workers are being detained, arrested in the middle of the street, people who don’t even identify themselves are deporting them. And these oil companies have been complicit in denying us to know the truth, paying millions to pay so-called scientists to deny that their products have caused climate change,” Rivera said.
When I asked Rivera if dumping 76 would be a worthy response to the ICE raids — a way for the Dodgers to show that they care about Latino fans — she had a simple answer: “Of course. That would be a major breakthrough.”
“I see a consistent pattern of disregard for the well-being of the people they are profiting from,” she said.
Community organizer Alicia Rivera speaks at a rally outside Dodger Stadium on Sept. 22.
(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)
That pattern arguably goes back decades.
The Chavez Ravine bill wouldn’t have forced the Dodgers to pay a cent to displaced families or their descendants; all it would have done is create a task force to study reparations. But the team has long shied away from so much as discussing the land’s grim backstory.
Only five entities paid lobbyists to weigh in on AB 1950, per an open-source database that compiles state records. Two of them — Fieldstead and Co. and Inclusive Action for the City — went on record supporting the legislation. I confirmed that a third group, the Western Center on Law & Poverty, was also in support.
Only the Dodgers and McCourt’s real estate company, McCourt Partners, haven’t publicly taken a stance.
The Dodgers lobbied the Legislature on AB 1950, while McCourt lobbied both the Legislature and the governor’s office, the records show.
Again, it’s tough to know what happened behind the scenes. Lawmakers passed the bill overwhelmingly, but only after a Senate committee nixed plans for a local task force — exactly what Newsom claimed he wanted.
As far as Wendy Carrillo is concerned, though, the lobbying records speak for themselves.
Carrillo was the state Assembly member, no longer in office, who wrote AB 1950. When I told her what I’d learned, she was outraged. She felt the records confirmed her suspicion that the Dodgers helped kill the bill.
She accused the team of “being disconnected from the very fan base that they have.”
“That same criticism can be made toward their visit to Trump at the White House, and their lack of understanding this moment in Los Angeles amid the growing ICE raids,” Carrillo said.
Dodgers owner Mark Walter looks on as President Trump speaks at the White House in April. The team visited Washington, D.C., to celebrate its 2024 World Series championship.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Indeed, many fans are far from satisfied with the team’s response to Trump’s cruelty. Which is no surprise, given that the Dodgers still seem eager to avoid angering Trump. Team president Stan Kasten was maddeningly vague in his statement touting the $1 million for immigrants, describing the raids as “what’s happening in Los Angeles” and acknowledging only that said happenings have “reverberated among thousands upon thousands of people.”
In contrast, L.A. women’s soccer team Angel City spoke up immediately about the “fear and uncertainty” created by the raids. Its players wore “Immigrant City Football Club” shirts that declared, “Los Angeles is for everyone.”
To Carrillo, the Dodgers’ latest failure to show true solidarity with its Latino fan base is another manifestation of the team’s original sin — its decades-long refusal to acknowledge the Mexican American communities of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde, which were bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium.
Carrillo, who’s running for state Senate in a district that would include Dodger Stadium, wants Walter and his co-owners — who include basketball legend Magic Johnson and tennis star Billie Jean King — to support a memorial for displaced Chavez Ravine families. And to offer more vocal support for persecuted immigrants today.
The team said its $1 million in donations would be followed by “additional announcements.” So far, crickets.
Owning up to Chavez Ravine’s sordid history would be a great step. So would getting rid of the 76 ads.
Both actions would infuriate the MAGA crowd — but so would just about anything the Dodgers might do in response to the ICE raids. In fact, the backlash has already started. A group co-founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, has filed a civil rights complaint against the Dodgers.
Whatever they do next, the Dodgers will make some enemies. Just like they did when they signed Jackie Robinson and broke baseball’s color barrier. The only question is whether they’ll once again stand for justice.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.
July 10 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Monday named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to also serve as interim NASA administrator.
Janet Petro, a former leader of the Kennedy Space Center, has been the agency’s acting administrator since Trump became president on Jan. 20. The administrator reports directly to the president.
“Sean is doing a TREMENDOUS job in handling our Country’s Transportation Affairs, including creating a state-of-the-art Air Traffic Control systems, while at the same time rebuilding our roads and bridges, making them efficient, and beautiful, again,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. “He will be a fantastic leader of the ever more important Space Agency, even if only for a short period of time. Congratulations, and thank you, Sean.”
Duffy, a lawyer and broadcaster who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2002 to 2010, has no science background.
“Honored to accept this mission,” Duffy posted on X. “Time to take over space. Let’s launch.”
The president hasn’t nominated anyone for the agency after he withdrew billionaire Jared Isaacman’s name to lead NASA, citing a “thorough review of prior associations.”
The nomination was withdrawn on May 31, before the Senate was expected to vote on the nomination of Isaacman, who has twice traveled to space on private missions.
It was withdrawn on the day SpaceX chief Elon Musk left the White House after leading the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump, in a post on Truth Social on Sunday, said it was “inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life.”
In the message, Trump said he was “saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks.”
The proposed 2026 fiscal year budget for NASA is $18.8 billion, which is a 25% reduction on overall funding and the smallest since 1961 when Alan Shepard became the first American in space.
There are 17,000 permanent civil service employees with headquarters in Washington. Major locations are the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Johnson Space Center in Texas, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the Langley Research Center in Virginia, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
NASA relies on SpaceX to send its astronauts to the International Space Center.
The agency also primarily uses private contractors and suppliers to build its rockets and related systems.
The Department of Transportation has 57,000 employees, including the Federal Aviation Administration, safety of commercial motor vehicles and truckers, public transportation, railroads and maritime transport and ports.
Several other political appointees are serving in multiple roles, according to NBC News.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio currently serves as the interim national security adviser and national archivist.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is the acting head of the Library of Congress.
Jamieson Greer is the U.S. trade representative, acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and acting special counsel of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
Russell Vought is director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Richard Grenell, a special U.S.envoy, is president the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
And Daniel Driscoll is secretary of the Army and the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Masked federal agents are snatching up immigrants. It’s been less than two weeks since the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. President Trump’s long-threatened tariffs could finally kick in next week.
Given all that, most people probably aren’t focused on climate change.
But they should be. Because Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed the Senate this week and was poised to clear the House early Thursday, would do more than gut Medicaid, cut student loan relief and increase funding for deportations. It would kill federal support for solar and wind power, undoing President Biden’s historic climate law and punishing Americans with deadlier air, more lethal heat waves and higher electric bills.
I’m usually a climate optimist. But it’s hard to find reasons for hope right now.
The Senate bill would eliminate tax credits for solar and wind farms that don’t come online by the end of 2027 — a brutal deadline for projects that take years to permit, finance and construct. That would slam the brakes on new development and also jeopardize hundreds of projects already in the works — not only solar and wind farms, but also factories to build solar panels, wind turbines, lithium-ion batteries and other clean energy technologies.
Solar and wind farms that start construction by June 2026 would get tax credits no matter when they come online, a last-minute concession to the handful of Republican senators with a modicum of sense.
As if needing to counterbalance that concession, Republican leaders added lucrative tax credits for metallurgical coal, an incredibly dirty fossil fuel that’s mostly shipped to China and other countries to make steel.
The bill would also end tax credits for rooftop solar, electric vehicles and energy-efficient home upgrades — while reducing royalty rates for coal mined on public lands, and requiring more oil and gas leasing on those lands.
“The fossil fuel industry helped pay for this government, and now they’re getting their reward,” Bill McKibben, the preeminent climate author and activist, wrote in his newsletter.
That’s part of the explanation. Another part, I think, is that most voters aren’t paying close attention.
Polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Americans want cleaner energy, and climate action writ large. But polls also show that climate ranks low as a priority for most Americans.
Wind turbines in the California desert, seen from Highway 58.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
So when it comes time for Trump and his allies to pay for their deficit-ballooning tax cuts — which mostly benefit the rich — clean energy is an easy target. They can tell outrageous lies about solar and wind being unreliable and expensive, and many people will either believe them or not care enough to seek out the truth.
Indeed, Trump wrote on social media last month that renewable energy tax credits are a “giant SCAM.” He claimed that wind turbines “and the rest of this ‘JUNK’” are “10 times more costly than any other energy.”
That’s not even remotely true. Authoritative sources, including the investment bank Lazard, report that solar and wind are America’s cheapest sources of new electricity, even without tax credits. Those low costs help explain why solar, wind and batteries made up 94% of new power capacity in the U.S. last year. Even in Texas, they’re booming.
For now, at least. John Ketchum, president of Florida-based NextEra Energy, warned the Trump administration in March that shelving renewables and battery storage would “force electricity prices to the moon.”
Lo and behold, research firm Energy Innovation estimates the Senate bill would cause average household energy costs to increase $130 annually by 2030. The firm also predicts 760,000 lost jobs by 2030.
“Families will face higher electric bills, factories will shut down, Americans will lose their jobs, and our electric grid will grow weaker,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Assn.
The point about the grid growing weaker is key. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, one of three Republicans to vote against the bill, mentioned a global turbine shortage that’s slowing the construction of gas-fired power plants. He stated plainly what energy executives know: that renewables and batteries are needed for a reliable grid.
“What you have done is create a blip in power service,” Tillis told his colleagues.
For one thing, solar and wind projects require big upfront investments, after which the fuel, be it sun or wind, is free. Gas plants are often less expensive to build, but they can subject consumers to huge utility bill swings when fuel costs soar — during geopolitical turmoil, for instance, or during climate-fueled weather disasters.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Eland solar and storage plant, located in Kern County, generates electricity for a record-low price.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Also relevant: Fossil fuel subsidies are so deeply entrenched in the U.S. tax code that they rarely make news. Coal, oil and gas benefit from tens of billions of dollars in subsidies every year, by some estimates.
And that’s without accounting for the bigger wildfires, harsher droughts, stronger storms, hotter heat waves and other harms of fossil fuel combustion, including air pollution that kills millions of people worldwide each year. Oil, gas and coal companies don’t pay those costs. Taxpayers do.
So, yes, solar and wind still need a leg up. But even under Biden’s climate law, the U.S. hasn’t been reducing heat-trapping emissions enough to help keep global warming to less-than-catastrophic levels.
And now, under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the U.S. will be moving backward instead of forward.
So if you care about the climate crisis, what can you do?
I wish I could say California was doubling down on climate leadership, like it did during Trump’s first term. Sadly, Gov. Gavin Newsom hasn’t prioritized clean energy as he readies a possible presidential run. Again and again, he and his appointees have yielded to the fossil fuel industry and its allies — on plastics recycling, oil refinery profits, emissions disclosures and more.
Other Golden State leaders are doing no better. This week, lawmakers passed an awful law pushed by Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) that will pause new energy efficiency rules for homes until 2031. Meanwhile, a potentially transformative “climate superfund” bill — which would charge fossil fuel companies for their pollution and use the money to help Californians cope with climate disasters — is languishing in Sacramento.
The landscape is bleak. But we’re not doomed.
The planet will almost certainly warm beyond an internationally agreed upon target of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But 2 degrees is a lot better than 2.5 degrees, and way better than 3 degrees. Climate change isn’t a game we win or lose. Every bit of avoided warming means safer, healthier lives for more people.
Yes, the U.S. is a climate train wreck right now. But global warming is just like immigration or healthcare: Nothing will change if most of us do nothing. So don’t tune out. Don’t surrender to despair. Bring up climate when you talk to your friends and call your representatives. Make protest signs about it. Let it guide your vote.
As McKibben wrote: “Our job from here on out … is to make ourselves heard.”
“It may not work tomorrow. It may not work until we’ve gotten more decent people into office. But it’s our job, and not to be shirked,” he wrote. “And in some sad way it’s an honor: We’re the people who get to make the desperate stand for a country and a planet that works.”
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.
Netflix has announced a new partnership that will bring additional live content to customers at no extra charge, having unveiled a collaboration with space agency NASA
Netflix has announced a new partnership(Image: SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Streaming platform Netflix has announced a collaboration that’s set to bring additional live content to customers for no extra charge. It’s unveiled plans for a partnership with NASA, which is scheduled to launch in the coming months.
Live content from NASA+ – which launched back in 2023 – will be available internationally through Netflix from later this summer. It has said that customers will be able to stream it directly on the platform and on all memberships.
It’s been teased that fans can expect rocket launches, astronaut spacewalks, mission coverage and live views of Earth from the International Space Station. Netflix has said that the new content will be available to stream in HD.
Netflix and space agency NASA shared the news yesterday ahead of the launch. It’s been announced that the feeds will be on the interface of the streaming platform, alongside customer’s favourite shows, starting later this summer.
Netflix has announced that it’s partnering with NASA to bring NASA+ content to customers(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
NASA has said that through the partnership its work in science and exploration will be “even more accessible”. It added that it will increase engagement and inspire a global audience, with Netflix said to reach more than 700 million people.
Rebecca Sirmons, general manager of NASA+, said: “The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 calls on us to share our story of space exploration with the broadest possible audience. Together, we’re committed to a Golden Age of Innovation and Exploration – inspiring new generations – right from the comfort of their couch or in the palm of their hand from their phone.”
Netflix teased that the countdown has begun. It said: “Whether you’re a die-hard space nerd or someone who just really, really enjoys seeing Earth glow from 250 miles up, the countdown has officially begun.”
The streaming platform added on its Tudum site: “So go ahead, set a reminder, pop some popcorn, and tilt your screen skyward. The next giant leap for humankind might just start with you pressing play.”
Fans can expect rocket launches, mission coverage and other livestreams through the collaboration(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
Additional details and schedules are set to be announced ahead of launch. Alongside the news of the partnership, it’s been confirmed that NASA+ remains free, without ads, through the NASA app and on the agency’s website.
Netflix has said that new content will be included in all its memberships through the partnership. The streaming platform, which increased its prices for existing customers, in line with fees for new subscribers, earlier this year, currently offers three different plans for customers who are based in the UK.
Standard with adverts is priced at £5.99 per month, whilst advert-free Standard is now £12.99 per month. Premium, which includes Ultra HD and other additional benefits not included in the other two plans, is £18.99 per month.
NASA+ launched two years ago as a streaming platform for NASA, which is space agency of the US. Alongside its live content, the website currently offers programmes including documentaries like Our Alien Earth and Moon 101.
NASA tests RS-25 engine No. 20001 on Friday, at the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Test teams fired the engine for almost 500 seconds, the same amount of time RS-25 engines fire during a launch of a Space Launch System rocket on Artemis missions to the moon. Photo by NASA
June 23 (UPI) — NASA fired up a full-duration test of its new RS-25 engine that will power the Space Launch System rocket on Artemis missions to the moon, the space agency announced Monday.
NASA tested RS-25 engine No. 20001 on Friday at the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center at Bay St. Louis in Mississippi. The full-duration “hot fire” test was the first since NASA completed certification testing for new production RS-25 engines last year.
The engine, built by contractor L3Harris Technologies — formerly Aerojet Rocketdyne — was fired up for nearly eight-and-a-half minutes. That is the same amount of time it would take four RS-25 engines to launch an SLS rocket, sending astronauts aboard the Orion into orbit. The engine was also fired up to the 111% power level to test its limits.
The test was conducted by a team from NASA, L3Harris and Syncom Space Services, which is the contractor for site facilities. All RS-25 engines are being tested and proven flightworthy at NASA Stennis after the space agency completed its RS-25 certification test series in April 2024.
“The newly produced engines on future SLS rockets will maintain the high reliability and safe flight operational legacy the RS-25 is known for while enabling more affordable high-performance engines for the next era of deep space exploration,” Johnny Heflin, SLS liquid engines manager, said last year.
The RS-25 engine dates back to the 1960s, with a previous iteration of Rocketdyne from the 1970s. NASA’s first space shuttle flight used RS-25 engines to launch in April 1981.
It will take four RS-25 engines, producing a combined 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, to launch the SLS rocket for Artemis missions.
NASA is targeting the first crewed Artemis mission, Artemis II, for April 2026. It will be the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. During Artemis II, four astronauts will make a trip around the moon. Artemis III will include a lunar landing, which is currently scheduled for 2027.
