Cosmic Log
What game was U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., playing when he asked Caltech geochemist Kenneth Farley whether there was any evidence of an ancient civilization on Mars?
The question was an add-on at today’s House Space Subcommittee hearing on NASA’s flagship missions to Mars and to Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter.
In the year 2037, non-autonomous vehicles will be as much of a curiosity as riding a horse is today, tech billionaire Elon Musk says.
Musk also says that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence is “really like the scariest problem for me,” and that the government has to set up something like the Federal Artificial Intelligence Administration before it’s too late.
The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla laid out his latest vision for the future of transportation, AI and space exploration over the weekend at the National Governors Association’s summer meeting in Providence, R.I. Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, whose state hosts Tesla’s first battery-producing Gigafactory, served as the emcee for the July 15 fireside chat.
The hush-hush space startup Relativity Space is still in stealth mode, but CEO and co-founder Tim Ellis lifted the veil just a bit on the company’s business plan and eight-figure funding today in Washington, D.C.
Ellis shared the witness table with other space executives and experts at a Capitol Hill hearing organized by the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness to focus on public-private space partnerships.
“There are people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the very nature of space exploration,” Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in his opening remarks. “And if they keep pressing forward, they just might.”
You know that viral photo of Vice President Mike Pence putting his hand on a piece of space hardware marked with a “Do Not Touch” sign? Don’t worry about it, NASA says.
The picture, snapped by news photographers on July 6 during Pence’s tour of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, spread like Photoshopped wildfire around the internet. It’s easy to see why: Pence looks like someone blatantly caught with his hand in the figurative cookie jar.
Vice President Mike Pence, the newly minted chairman of a revived National Space Council, said today that President Donald Trump is committed to a return to the moon and a push onward to Mars.
Pence laid out the broad strokes of the Trump administration’s aspirations for space exploration during a visit to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Here from this bridge to space, our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,” Pence declared.
He cast last week’s revitalization of the National Space Council, which was disbanded by the Clinton administration in 1993, as a signal that space policy would be given a higher profile.
After months of foreshadowing, President Donald Trump today signed an executive order to revive the National Space Council, a move that’s likely to open the way for space policy changes that have been largely put on hold during the White House transition.
The order was signed at a White House ceremony on the eve of a long Fourth of July weekend. Among those in attendance: members of Congress, Boeing’s Dennis Muilenburg and other aerospace executives, and astronauts including Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin.
“Today’s announcement sends a clear signal to the world that we are restoring America’s proud legacy of leadership in space,” Trump said.
Vice President Mike Pence will serve as the council’s chairman, and the members will include top-level administration officials including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, the heads of the Commerce, Transportation and Homeland Security departments and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
How will we send humans to the moon, Mars and other destinations in space? The chances are good that electric propulsion will play a role, and a company called MSNW is at the cutting edge of that technology.
The director of propulsion research for Redmond, Wash.-based MSNW, Anthony Pancotti, will take a share of Capitol Hill’s spotlight on June 29 during a hearing organized by the House Subcommittee on Space. And he expects to learn as much from his encounter with lawmakers as they’ll learn from him.
“We’re all curious about what Congress wants to talk about,” Pancotti told GeekWire from Washington, D.C., on the eve of the hearing.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk says he’ll have no choice but to leave his posts on the White House’s advisory councils if President Donald Trump decides to withdraw from the landmark Paris climate accord.
Multiple news reports, attributed to unnamed administration officials, suggest that Trump is leaning toward doing just that – although there may be some added “caveats” that complicate the outcome.
Musk, a strong proponent of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, said he’s been urging the president to abide by the Paris pact, which calls on nations to reduce their carbon emissions in accordance with voluntary plans.
“Don’t know which way Paris will go, but I’ve done all I can to advise directly to POTUS [president of the United States], through others in WH [White House] and via councils, that we remain,” Musk tweeted.
The Trump administration wants to eliminate federal support for the West Coast’s ShakeAlert earthquake warning system, but its backers in Congress won’t let it go without a fight.
“Defunding the earthquake early warning system isn’t just irresponsible – it’s dangerous,” Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., told GeekWire in an emailed statement.
“This is about giving people a warning of an earthquake or a tsunami. A few precious seconds of warning can be the difference between life and death for a child in a school on the coast or a physician doing surgery in a local hospital,” Kilmer said. “This cut to public safety is just plain wrong, so we’re going to fight for a budget that doesn’t put people at risk.”
ShakeAlert was pioneered in California, but in April the monitoring and alert system was extended to Oregon and Washington state, where seismologists say there’s the potential for a catastrophic magnitude-9 quake nicknamed the Really Big One.
President Donald Trump today signed a long-awaited executive order aimed at beefing up cybersecurity at federal government agencies – with a shift of computer capabilities to the cloud as a key part of the strategy.
“We’ve got to move to the cloud and try to protect ourselves instead of fracturing our security posture,” Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert told reporters during a White House briefing.
The executive order gives the lead role in managing the cloud shift to the director of the White House’s newly established American Technology Council, which is due to meet for the first time next month.
Although the council’s full roster of members has not yet been announced, the director is said to be Chris Liddell, who formerly served as chief financial officer at Microsoft and General Motors.