Cosmic Log
The White House says President Donald Trump has struck an “informal deal” with Boeing on a $3.9 billion fixed-price contract for two new Air Force One planes.
“Thanks to the president’s negotiations, the contract will save the taxpayers more than $1.4 billion,” White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said today in a widely distributed statement.
The extent of the savings is debatable, however.
Space industry deregulation, and the potential perils posed by China’s space program, shared the spotlight at today’s meeting of the National Space Council, presided over by Vice President Mike Pence.
Commercial space ventures and NASA’s vision for deep-space exploration also got shout-outs when members of the council, newly named advisers and other VIPs gathered inside the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“As we continue to push further into our solar system, new businesses and entire enterprises will be built to seize the infinite possibilities before us,” Pence declared. “And there will be no limit to the jobs and prosperity that will be created across this country.”
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith are among 29 candidates for the National Space Council’s Users Advisory Group, which is meant to promote coordination, cooperation and information exchange for the U.S. space effort. Vice President Mike Pence listed the candidates on the eve of a National Space Council meeting at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
AUSTIN, Texas — Joe Biden may no longer be vice president, but he’s still leading the charge for his cancer moonshot, and for science funding as well.
“The United States government, at this point in our development, should be doubling and tripling down on investment in pure research across the board,” Biden said today in Austin at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
That line drew sympathetic applause from the hundreds of scientists and educators who turned out to see the 75-year-old statesman.
Biden is said to be considering a presidential run in 2020, and if that’s the case, his views on science could well be part of the platform.
The White House’s proposed five-year budget plan would provide a bigger boost to commercial space efforts, including a potential handover of operations on the International Space Station by 2025 and private-sector moon landings.
It also calls for zeroing out funding for some high-profile Earth science missions, such as the Earth-watching DSCOVR satellite and the next Orbiting Carbon Observatory.
NASA’s $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope is still go for launch next year, and the budget supports the launch of a mission in the 2020s to study Europa, a moon of Jupiter that’s thought to harbor a subsurface ocean and perhaps life. But the next-next-generation WFIRST space telescope would be canceled.
During a “State of NASA” address delivered at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, acting administrator Robert Lightfoot said eliminating WFIRST was one of the “hard decisions” that had to be made. He said the space agency would be “taking those resources and redirecting them to other agency priorities.”
Lightfoot said another hard decision would result in the elimination of NASA’s Office of Education.
Overall, NASA would receive $19.9 billion for the fiscal year beginning in October, thanks to a prior budget agreement already passed by Congress. That’s $400 million above current levels, with more than half of that money set aside for exploration programs aimed at the moon and eventually Mars.
Immigration, tax cuts and crime loomed large in President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union Address, but technology and innovation went unmentioned tonight during a speech that lasted nearly an hour and a half.
The word “science” was used once, toward the end, when Trump paid tribute to the American people. “They push the bounds of science and discovery,” he said.
There was no mention of space exploration, as there was when Trump addressed Congress last year soon after taking office. The impacts of climate change, artificial intelligence and automation — trends that are already reshaping the nation and the world — went unaddressed. Not a word was spoken about the internet or net (non-)neutrality.
Such omissions didn’t sit well with science policy experts such as Rush Holt, a former Democratic congressman who now serves as the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Bill Nye the Science Guy is going to the State of the Union Address, but as a guest of President Donald Trump’s choice for NASA administrator. And therein lies the rub.
The NASA nominee is U.S. Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., who became notorious as a climate policy opponent during the Obama administration. In 2013, for instance, Bridenstine called on President Barack Obama to apologize for spending so much money on climate research.
Bridenstine backtracked a bit last year during Senate hearings on his NASA nomination. He said he didn’t know whether climate change was being driven primarily by human activities, “but I do know that humans have absolutely contributed to global warming.”
Such statements may have helped smooth relations with Nye, who has spoken up long and loudly for climate science and measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. He explained why he accepted Bridenstine’s invitation to Capitol Hill on Monday in a Facebook posting.
White House budget plans are zeroing in on zeroing out federal funding for the International Space Station by 2025, to free up money for a Deep Space Gateway in lunar orbit.
The plan is already generating opposition from those who want to leave the door open for continued government involvement in the space station beyond 2025, including Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
“If the administration plans to abruptly pull us out of the International Space Station in 2025, they’re going to have a fight on their hands,” Nelson, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said in a statement.
When it comes to the U.S. military, football trumps the government shutdown, even without Boeing’s help. The American Forces Network essentially went off the air once this weekend’s shutdown took effect, which suggested that it wouldn’t be airing NFL football playoffs for overseas military families. That sparked an outcry, and an offer from Boeing to “do whatever needed” to get the games on the air. In the end, the Department of Defense gave the go-ahead to revive two channels, AFN News and AFN Sports, and broadcast today’s conference championships. Boeing, meanwhile, got a nice tweet-out from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Twitter says it has followed through on its commitment to Congress by identifying and suspending more than 50,000 automated accounts linked to Russian agents – and alerting 677,775 Twitter users in the U.S. who followed those accounts, or retweeted or liked their postings.
Thousands of those accounts have been found just in the past couple of months.
In today’s update, the company says it’ll enlist machine-learning tools to boost its ability to slap down fake accounts, coordinated tweet campaigns and bots.
The measures were taken to address concerns sparked by the 2016 presidential campaign, during which agents from Russia’s infamous Internet Research Agency and other Russia-linked entities mounted a propaganda effort that boosted GOP candidate Donald Trump.