Marina Koren | The Atlantic

What to Expect From Elon Musk’s Government Makeover

2024-11-13T15:48:35-05:00

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As promised, Donald Trump has given Elon Musk a job in (or at least adjacent to) his second administration, in a brand-new extragovernmental organization named for a meme turned cryptocurrency: the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE. The Trump campaign has already started selling T-shirts to commemorate the occasion, featuring Trump, Musk, and dogecoin’s Shiba Inu mascot, with the Martian landscape in the background—because in addition to his formal role, Musk is primed to become Trump’s unofficial space czar. (Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate whom Trump appointed to lead the effort alongside Musk, does not appear on the T-shirt.)

Musk’s role is a glaring conflict of interest; SpaceX has been an aerospace contractor for years and could stand to profit nicely from the creation of DOGE, which could shift government functions to private companies in the name of cost cutting. But it also raises a question with real stakes for Americans. How might Musk—the centibillionaire, innovator, right-wing activist, and relentless troll—actually steer this new effort? His leadership of his businesses, especially SpaceX, suggests that he’ll throw himself into the job with zeal, casting government efficiency as an existential effort, just like the quest to make life multiplanetary.

SpaceX is the most successful rocket company in America, and it became successful by not behaving like a government organization. It ascended under Musk, who adopted Silicon Valley’s “Move fast and break things” philosophy and displayed a willingness to blow up rockets until he got the recipe just right. The approach suggests that, in a SpaceX-inspired government, Musk would not just cut through red tape, but annihilate it with a flamethrower. In yesterday’s announcement, the president-elect sounded equally eager to break things, saying that “the Great Elon Musk” would lead DOGE to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

Even before his official appointment, Musk had identified one federal agency he’d like to retool: the Federal Aviation Administration, which is in charge of approving launch licenses for rockets. On X last month, Musk wrote of the FAA, “Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations (that have nothing to do with safety!), humanity will never reach Mars.” SpaceX is in the midst of a ferocious development campaign for its most powerful rocket, Starship, and has sought launch licenses at a faster pace than the FAA is willing to grant them. Now the FAA, already short-staffed, could be at the mercy of Senior Adviser Elon Musk, given carte blanche to explode regulations by a president who has expressed a desire to see American astronauts land on Mars while he is in office. Musk would also have something to gain by overhauling national space policy. NASA has hired traditional aerospace contractors, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to build the rocket that will transport astronauts to lunar orbit. But that rocket is so expensive to launch that even NASA’s own inspector general has recommended that the agency consider alternative options for future space missions. Lawmakers would be loath to cancel the program, which has supported jobs in every state. But with Musk in his ear, Trump could certainly try.

[Read: MAGA goes to Mars]

Regardless of which agencies he’s targeting, Musk will almost certainly throw himself into the DOGE job, as he did in the early years of SpaceX. Despite appearances, he has the time: Although there’s no doubt that his singular talents drove the firm to pull off incredible feats, other executives now oversee day-to-day operations at SpaceX without his input. The same is true at Tesla. That combination of dedication and availability could make him an effective facilitator of the government-efficiency department’s mandate.

But Musk and Trump share a governing style that involves making surprise decrees that leave their staff scrambling. In 2014, when Musk publicly unveiled a new version of SpaceX’s cargo capsule reconfigured for future human passengers, he said that the vehicle would be capable of landing anywhere that engineers wanted upon its return to Earth. This was news to the SpaceX engineers, who had designed the spacecraft to parachute down to the ocean. Engineers set aside their existing designs—conventional, sure, but ready to go—and focused on Musk’s new vision. Eventually, it became clear that the design wasn’t workable for NASA’s deadline, and the engineering team managed to convince leadership that the effort wasn’t worth pursuing any further. (Years later, SpaceX managed to guide its rocket boosters out of the sky and to a gentle touchdown.) Former SpaceX employees have told me that Musk’s occasional fixation on certain business operations has occasionally slowed down their work. Some of his decisions appear to simply be bad ones, such as discouraging workers from wearing yellow safety vests because he dislikes bright colors, as Reuters reported last year. It is a particularly baffling move, considering that SpaceX has a very high rate of workplace injuries; the Reuters investigation revealed at least 600 previously unreported injuries at SpaceX in the past decade, such as electrocutions and amputations.

Musk also maintains a work environment with its own form of bureaucracy, organized around appeasing the boss’s whims. In 2022, SpaceX fired a small group of employees after they sent a letter to senior executives describing Musk’s public actions as “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” The letter was signed by hundreds of employees, but management deemed the effort a diversion from SpaceX’s founding mission to reach Mars. Former SpaceX employees have told me that they often couched feedback in the glossy terms of that mission, so as not to displease Musk. Instead of coming right out with safety concerns, for example, they would advise against certain decisions because of the mission. Such overly cautious managing up, one could argue, is not very efficient.

[Read: The messy reality of Elon Musk’s space city]

According to CNN, Musk has spent nearly every day since the election at Mar-a-Lago, joining the president-elect for meals on the patio and rounds of golf. Of the two DOGE chairs, he is clearly Trump’s favorite; the Mars hype and memery are only just beginning. But the very fact that Musk and Ramaswamy were appointed jointly—two leaders where presumably one could do—undermines the very premise of the Department of Government Efficiency. Even in his mission to rid the federal government of every bit of wasteful spending, Musk still has to kneel to someone else’s version of bureaucracy.

MAGA Goes to Mars

2024-11-05T12:07:56-05:00

If NASA’s current schedule sticks, the next American president will oversee the first moon landing since the Apollo era and preside over the agency’s plans for sending astronauts deeper into the solar system. Elon Musk, the CEO of the world’s most successful private-spaceflight company, has made clear who he thinks that president should be. This fall, he declared that Kamala Harris would doom humankind to an earthbound existence, whereas Donald Trump would fulfill SpaceX’s founding dream of putting people on Mars. Trump seems equally enthusiastic about Musk’s space plans. “Elon, get those rocket ships going, because we want to reach Mars before the end of my term,” he said on the campaign trail.

A Trump presidency could push America toward a new era of space travel, and Trump has demonstrated his enthusiasm for space exploration—as president, he created the Space Force. Otherworldly ambitions, though, can come with earthly costs.

The American government is already relying on SpaceX to fly astronauts to space, provide satellite internet for operations across the U.S. military, and help realize its plans to return to the moon. A Trump administration could increase that codependence, further embedding SpaceX—and its CEO—in the framework of American governance. NASA has always used private companies to fulfill its greatest ambitions, but Trump could essentially outsource the imagination driving the future of American spaceflight to Musk.

No matter who is president, Musk will play a role in America’s future in space. NASA has hired SpaceX to develop a version of Starship, its biggest rocket yet, to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the end of the decade. The agency will also likely rely on the vehicle to make its Mars dreams a reality in the decade after that. SpaceX has launched Starship prototypes steadily over the past year from its South Texas base, and seeks to dramatically increase its annual cadence of test flights, from five to 25. But according to Musk and other company officials, the Federal Aviation Administration, which is responsible for approving rocket launches, is holding them back from testing Starship and sending commercial payloads into orbit as quickly as they’d like. FAA officials have defended the agency’s process for launch evaluations, saying that SpaceX—whose Starship project is unlike any previous space program—must meet safety requirements before every takeoff.

[Read: What’s standing in Elon Musk’s way?]

A newly reinstalled President Trump, who once asked NASA to hurry up and squeeze in a Mars mission before the end of his first term, would presumably take no issue with a pressure campaign against his own FAA to remove regulations. He could instruct the agency to relax its rules, even give Musk some (official or unofficial) power over it. Trump has promised to instate Musk as the head of a government-efficiency commission. Such an appointment could lead to all sorts of conflicts of interest, and perhaps even unprecedented results. “You have potentially a high-level senior adviser in the person who owns the largest and most capable private space company in the world, with a direct line to the president of the United States, pitching a Mars mission in four years,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, who has written extensively about the politics of America’s moon and Mars efforts, told me. “We don’t have historical examples of that.” (NASA could not make agency officials available for an interview before this story was published.)

Unshackled from the FAA, SpaceX could run dozens of Starship missions in the next few years, which is exactly what NASA needs in order to start dropping astronauts on the moon and beyond (and achieving those feats before rival nations do). Space travel is an itch that the United States, under any president, seems unable to resist scratching. “We do it because we can—and because we probably will not be satisfied until we do,” John Logsdon, a space historian, once told me. Musk has long argued that the future of the human species depends on reaching Mars. Government officials may not use the same vocabulary as Musk, but they have bought into his vision nonetheless. In recent years, former top officials in NASA’s human-spaceflight program have taken jobs at SpaceX.

In the meantime, though, more SpaceX flights—and more power for Musk—could be messy, or even dangerous. As Starship development has quickened in recent years, SpaceX’s rate of worker injuries has outpaced the industry average. Federal and state regulators say that SpaceX has disregarded environmental rules at its launch site in South Texas, violating the Clean Water Act by releasing industrial wastewater during launches. (The company has said that the water is not hazardous.) And perhaps most concerning, where a Trump administration could clear hurdles for SpaceX, it could also embolden the company’s chief executive, a man whose conduct is often questionable at best. Recent reports alleging that Musk engages in regular conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin led NASA’s chief to call for an investigation.

NASA has previously acted in response to comparatively mild Musk antics; in 2018, the agency ordered a review of workplace culture at SpaceX, which was preparing to fly NASA astronauts on a brand-new spacecraft, after Musk smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The Trump administration didn’t stand in the way of that investigation, but that was before Musk became the former president’s No. 1 donor and certified hype man. A Putin-related inquiry under a second Trump administration is unlikely. Trump, who has praised the Russian dictator and refused to vocally support Ukraine, would sooner hop on a three-way phone call with Musk and Putin. Already, with SpaceX’s growing inventory of Starlink internet satellites, Musk has tremendous control over how the world communicates, and has maintained Starlink’s independence from the U.S. government and others. But if President Trump asks Government-Efficiency Adviser Musk to, say, shut off Starlink services over a NATO ally or a nuclear power, one wonders how Musk would react.

[Read: The unique danger of a Trumpist oligarchy]

A Harris administration would, of course, approach Musk differently. Musk has publicly mused about why no one has attempted to assassinate Harris and suggested that Harris would order his arrest if she wins the presidency. That’s far-fetched, even if a Harris administration might be less reluctant to investigate the billionaire’s ties to Putin. And no matter who takes the White House, to spurn SpaceX would mean hurting the U.S. space program. Boeing bungled its recent mission to ferry astronauts to the ISS so badly that SpaceX has at least a temporary monopoly over astronaut launches from American soil.

The American space program needs Musk, and he knows it. Without SpaceX, NASA astronauts could fly around the moon a dozen times and never touch down: NASA’s own rocket is supposed to get them into lunar orbit, but Starship is their ride to the surface. That leverage raises a worrying—if unlikely—possibility. Earlier this year, Musk told my colleague Damon Beres that he is willing to accept a Harris presidency, but only “if, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins.” Dreier suggested this hypothetical scenario: “What if Elon Musk just declared SpaceX won’t work with the Harris administration if he considers it illegitimate?” (Musk is certainly laying the groundwork for election denial—it appears to be his primary preoccupation on X these days.) Although such a decision would put SpaceX in breach of various contracts and cause tremendous turmoil, it would also make clear who controls American spaceflight.

A Moon-Size Hole in Cat Research

2024-10-21T14:20:30-04:00

Like many pet owners, my partner and I have a long list of nonsensical nicknames for our 10-year-old tabby, Ace: sugarplum, booboo, Angela Merkel, sharp claw, clompers, night fury, poof ball. But we reserve one nickname for a very specific time each month, when Ace is more restless than usual in the daytime hours, skulking around from room to room instead of snoozing on a blanket. Or when his evening sprints become turbocharged, and he parkours off the walls and the furniture to achieve maximum speed. On those nights, the moon hangs bright in the dark sky, almost entirely illuminated. Then, we call him the waning gibbous.

I don’t remember when I first decided to draw a connection between Ace’s zoomies and the moon, but pet websites bolstered my belief, even if they read like feline horoscopes. Besides, cats are mystical creatures of the night, the supernatural companions of witches, and all-around spooky. Ace’s wildness didn’t always match up with a waning gibbous, but it happened enough for me to keep the joke going, and start to wonder whether there might be a slice of truth in it. Other animals on Earth eat, grow, and live in tune with the moon. What about my eight-pound sugarplum?

The moon has long been falsely blamed for all sorts of odd human behaviors. Researchers have firmly debunked claims that a full moon causes more crime or emergency-room visits as pseudoscience. But veterinarians, cat researchers, and feline-behavior experts told me that the relationship between felines and the moon has barely been studied. No concrete evidence has definitively linked changes in feline behavior to the phases of the lunar cycle, but the sheer absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. “I wouldn’t say the case is closed,” Mikel Delgado, a cat-behavior consultant in California and the author of Play With Your Cat!, told me.

Among people who work with animals, fears of the full moon persist. “It was very common, and it still is common, for people who work in veterinary hospitals to start feeling anxious around a full moon and make comments to each other—Don’t jinx me; we’re going to see some crazy stuff,” Raegan Wells, an emergency-room veterinarian in Arizona, told me. Back in the 2000s, Wells and her colleagues at Colorado State University analyzed the cases of nearly 12,000 dogs and cats treated at the school’s veterinary-medicine center; their study found that the risk of emergencies was highest on days when the moon was mostly illuminated—during the waxing-gibbous, full, and waning-gibbous phases. But the researchers couldn’t say whether those additional emergencies were caused by lunar zoomies or were merely a statistical artifact.

Cat experts have a couple of theories for how the lunar cycle could, potentially, affect feline behavior. The extra glow of a full moon could embolden cats to explore more, “taking risks and doing things they normally wouldn’t do,” Britt Florkiewicz, an evolutionary psychologist and professor at Lyon College in Arkansas who studies facial signaling in cats and other animals, told me. A new moon could encourage them in a different way; when the night is darker, cats’ vision gives them an advantage. A study of outdoor cats, published last year, found that the animals were most nocturnally active around the time of a new moon. But it’s unclear whether indoor cats like mine could exhibit a similar tendency from their vantage point on the windowsill. Carlo Siracusa, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, told me that his cat, Elsa, often stares at the full moon from the top floor of his house, where the window provides a lovely view. Perhaps other cats do the same because the moonlight casts shadows on the walls of their home, Siracusa said. Cats are suckers for shadows.

Cats might be no more responsive to the specific waxing and waning of the moon than they are to any other changes in their environment, Siracusa said. In fact, he said, discovering something new in their vicinity is one of the two main triggers for cats to engage in zoomies. (The other is when they sense that they’re about to be fed.) During the pandemic, Siracusa saw an uptick in cats exhibiting aggression, a change he attributes to their owners suddenly working from home. “Spaces and times that were before pretty consistently predictable suddenly became very unpredictable,” Siracusa said. His patients’ owners propose all kinds of explanations for their cats’ behavior, and he always takes them seriously. “There are so many factors that can influence the behavior of a cat that just dismissing what someone says and saying, No, that’s just fantasy—I don’t think that’s appropriate,” he said.

[Read: A sort-of-common, very strange cat trick]

Humans have a natural tendency to draw associations and spot patterns, which makes pet owners masters of projection. When Wells and I spoke last week during a full moon, she reported that her cat Roy “has gotten into a lot more mischief this last 24 hours than is typical for him.” But she suspects that she noticed only because she had been thinking about our interview, and she had checked the moon phase. Plus, her family had just put up Halloween decorations, introducing novelty to the cat’s surroundings—perhaps that was why. Or maybe Roy, who is only a year old, is “just being a stinker,” Wells said.

Ace is the king of the household whether the moon is glowing or not. I like to watch him when he’s dozing in one of his favorite spots: on top of a small ottoman that we brought home last year from a yard sale so that we could finally put our feet up in front of the television, and that now serves as a literal pedestal for our fluffy boy. Moonsplaining, too, can create a sort of awestruck distance between cat owners and our pets; it casts them as mystifying creatures, not of this world, their true nature determined by celestial forces that mere mortals can only hope to comprehend. But it is fundamentally an attempt to better understand the inner lives of these small animals we share our lives with. “Humans are really bad at not anthropomorphizing and allowing our pets to be the species that they are,” Delgado said. Still, we are fantastically good at loving the animals that live with us, even in ways that defy logic. Maybe my cat is a little moon-crazy, or maybe I am. Either way, Ace will always be a waning gibbous to me.

The Truth About Hurricane Geoengineering

2024-10-12T08:00:00-04:00

Over the past month, as meteorologists warned millions of Americans to protect themselves from impending major hurricanes, they were forced to contemplate another, unexpected danger. Threatening messages spilled into forecasters’ inboxes. Meteorologists, those messages said, are in cahoots with the government to create hurricanes out of thin air and steer the storms toward specific places and people. They should suffer for it.

These particular conspiracy theories surfaced after Hurricane Helene and crescendoed as Hurricane Milton approached—two monster storms, with little time for Americans in hurricane country to catch their breath between them. The theories moved at maximum speed on X, where Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene pointed out that majority-Republican areas fell in Helene’s destructive path and said, “They can control the weather.” (Later, she clarified that “they” included people affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.) Hurricanes are “weather weapons,” per the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Others claim that the storms are instruments in a wily scheme against conservative voters, and that left-wing politicians have deviously chosen to unleash them just weeks from a dead-heat presidential election.

Claims of a Republican-hating cabal of meteorologists pulling stormy levers to park hurricanes over southern states are, perhaps all too obviously, false. There is no evidence that meteorologists or lawmakers have directed tropical cyclones to do their bidding, or have the capability to harness hurricanes in this way at all.

[Read: Milton is the hurricane that scientists were dreading]

And yet, much of the most persuasive misinformation contains a kernel of truth, and the hurricane conspiracy is no exception. Government agencies and teams of scientists have indeed attempted for decades to control the weather through geoengineering. They have seeded clouds with silver iodide to try to induce rain over parched areas, and tested a technique to brighten clouds so that they reflect more sunlight back into space. Some scientists want to try even more complex interventions, including mimicking a volcanic eruption that could help cool rising global temperatures. But hurricanes? Hurricanes are one of the most difficult natural phenomena to tamper with—so difficult that, right now, climate scientists don’t take the idea seriously.

Humans are not yet particularly good at any variety of geoengineering. The effectiveness of cloud seeding is still under debate. Dimming the sun is not as easy as flipping a switch, and requires the release of a quadrillion nearly invisible particles that must be tailored to just the right size. Experiments involving fertilizing the ocean with iron have shown promise on small scales, but they may not work at all if they’re deployed more widely. Hurricanes, with their extreme winds and flooding rains, defy any sort of human control. “Hurricane modification is not a thing,” Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, in Massachusetts, told me. “Attempting to alter the strength or track of a hurricane would be like trying to thwart a cruise ship with a rubber ducky.”

Conjuring hurricanes into existence is flat-out impossible. “Even with cloud seeding, we need the clouds to already be there in order to seed them,” Alyssa Stansfield, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah, told me. “We can’t create clouds in any way.” And hurricanes are especially unhackable because of their sheer size and power, she said. Storms like Milton radiate the energy of dozens of atomic bombs every hour. “It would take enormous energy to change a hurricane’s path or strength,” Juan Moreno-Cruz, a climate-policy researcher at the University of Waterloo, told me. “We can’t make or steer them, because they’re much more powerful than any technology we have.”

[Read: Hurricane Milton made a terrible prediction come true]

Hurricanes are also fundamentally different from typical storm clouds, Stansfield said. The water droplets that silver-iodide targets are less abundant within hurricanes, so the substance is less likely to achieve the desired effect. Nipping a hurricane in the bud is unrealistic too; dozens of tropical disturbances arise in the Atlantic basin every year, and scientists can’t predict which ones will balloon into hurricanes. Even as geoengineering is becoming more mainstream, hacking hurricanes isn’t being discussed, says Holly Jean Buck, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo and the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. “There’s no moral taboo,” Buck told me. “It’s just not a good idea scientifically.”

That hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from trying before. Starting in the early 1960s, Project STORMFURY carried out experiments on hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, far from land. A team of weather experts and military personnel released silver iodide into the storms’ rainbands, which they believed would reshuffle the storms’ structure and weaken their strongest winds. Researchers observed some diminished intensity, but the results were inconclusive—it was impossible to determine whether the effects were due to human intervention or the cyclones’ natural whims. The effort was canceled in 1983, and the method deemed not viable. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security convened a workshop for experts to brainstorm potential methods for hurricane modification. The ideas included scattering soot into the atmosphere over a hurricane to change air temperatures and reduce its power, spreading special film on the ocean so that cyclones encounter less moisture to use as fuel, and flying jet aircraft in the eye of a rolling storm to reverse its motion.

[Read: America’s hurricane luck is running out]

Nothing became of those ideas, and in some ways, that’s disappointing. Hurricanes claim lives and destroy livelihoods; Helene killed more than 200 people, making it the deadliest storm to hit the mainland United States since Katrina. But officials decided against further pursuing those concepts in part because they carry the same risks as any other geoengineering project: unintended and unknowable consequences. A hurricane purposefully deflected from one U.S. metropolis could, for example, end up ravaging another. If scientists could find a way to safely and reliably steer hurricanes away from populated shores, it would count as one of humanity’s most profound achievements, and completely change the way people live. Why would the government’s first instinct be to use that power to thwart political opposition?

The misinformation will surely continue in the coming weeks. Neither the election nor the hurricane season is over yet. Besides, there’s one more kernel of truth in the swirl of paranoia. Milton and Helene really might have been modified by human influence—just not in the ways that Greene and others claim. “The only way that humans are modifying hurricanes is through long-term warming of the ocean and atmosphere due to accumulation of carbon pollution, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels,” Francis said. Warming skies and seas provide extra energy for storms to consume, giving more and more hurricanes the chance to transform into rainier and windier disasters without historical precedent. Monster storms are not political plots; they are premonitions of our climate future.

Hurricane Milton Made a Terrible Prediction Come True

2024-10-09T17:18:23-04:00

Updated at 5:59 a.m. on October 10, 2024

After several days of whirling across the Gulf of Mexico, blowing at up to 180 miles per hour, Hurricane Milton made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast last night as the terrible embodiment of a historically destructive season. Milton inflated at a near-record pace, growing from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 behemoth in half a day, to become one of the most intense hurricanes in recorded history. The hurricane had already dispatched plenty of dangers, including a string of deadly tornadoes, before coming ashore as a Category 3 storm south of Tampa. Since then, it has torn across the state, knocking out power for more than 3 million people and destroying the roof of the Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium, which was housing emergency workers. It will be hours before the extent of Milton’s damage in Florida becomes clear.

The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was forecast to be monstrous, but what has actually happened is something more nuanced—and stranger. July began with Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 storm that emerged much earlier than any other in history. Then, what should have been the busiest part of the season was instead eerily quiet. It was “fairly surprising,” Emily Bercos-Hickey, a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told me. Then, beginning late last month, came a tremendous burst of activity: Hurricane Helene, which broke storm-surge records in Florida and dropped devastating rains far inland; a flurry of named storms that spun up in quick succession; and now Milton.

Hurricane experts are still trying to understand why the current season is so scrambled. The extreme storm in July, the sudden lull during the traditional hurricane peak in late August and early September, and the explosion of cyclones in October together suggest that “the climatological rules of the past no longer apply,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Florida who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me. For Truchelut, who has been in the business for 20 years, “there is a dreamlike unreality to living through this time,” as if he’s no longer living on the same planet he grew up on. During that summer lull, this hurricane season seemed like it might be a welcome bust. Instead, it is an indication that our collective sense of how hurricane season should proceed is fast becoming unreliable.

[Read: An alarming new trend in hurricane deaths]

The dire forecasts for the 2024 hurricane season were based on variables that are familiar to experts. This summer, Earth entered La Niña, which weakens the winds that can prevent hurricanes from growing too strong or forming at all. Meteorologists warned that record-high ocean temperatures across the tropical Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, along with the moisture stockpiled in our warming atmosphere, would fuel intense storms: four to seven major hurricanes compared with the usual three. Already, the 2024 season has conjured four major hurricanes. And it won’t end until November.

The mid-season lull, by contrast, was unexpected. Meteorologists also seem to have overpredicted the overall number of named storms—17 to 25 were forecast, and so far only 13 have arrived—though, again, there’s still time. “All the ingredients can be in place for an active or inactive season, but it’s the week-to-week variability that we can’t predict but which often controls what happens,” Jeff Masters, a hurricane expert in Michigan who previously worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. Many Atlantic hurricanes are fueled by atmospheric conditions along the coast of western Africa. But this summer, the region stifled hurricane formation instead, thanks to an unprecedentedly heavy monsoon season. Scientists understand the basic mechanics of the quiet period. What experts can’t say, right now, is whether this scenario occurred because of natural happenstance. “We don’t know for sure if that’s going to continue to happen with a warmer climate,” Bercos-Hickey said.

The summer hiatus isn’t the only way that this hurricane season has surprised meteorologists: More hurricanes than usual are making landfall in the mainland United States. With Milton, the season is one landfall away from tying the existing record of six. Hurricane experts have chalked this up to simple bad luck, just one more variable of hurricane activity that we can’t do anything about. But humans bear some responsibility for the fact that the hurricanes that arrive are, on average, worse. Preliminary studies suggest that climate change made Helene 10 percent rainier and 11 percent windier. “Eleven percent may not seem like much, but the destructive power of a hurricane increases by 50 percent for every 5 percent increase in the winds,” Masters said. Scientists believe that global warming is making hurricanes intensify more rapidly too. Milton, Helene, and Beryl all underwent rapid intensification this year.

[Read: Milton is the hurricane that scientists were dreading]

This hurricane season may be charting slightly behind predictions, but “if we look at actual impacts instead of general metrics, it has been a catastrophic year,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami, told me. In Florida, residents had just begun cleaning up from Helene’s wrath when Milton emerged. Two weeks is not nearly enough time between two major storms, each one dialed up to unleash more water, whether from the skies or the seas, than they likely would have several decades ago. Meteorologists cannot perfectly predict the trajectory of any given hurricane season—too much is up to chance. Now, in Florida, as the storm once again races toward open ocean, millions of people are about to find out what the odds have yielded for them.

An Alarming New Trend in Hurricane Deaths

2024-10-03T17:30:23-04:00

A week after Hurricane Helene ripped through the American Southeast, it has careened into a terrible category of natural disasters: By some measures, it is now the third-deadliest storm to make landfall in the United States, after Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Katrina. More than 200 people have now been reported dead. Over half of the fatalities so far occurred in North Carolina’s mountainous western region, where entire towns were crushed beneath the weight of relentless rains and crumbling earth. And the death toll is expected to keep rising.

Hurricanes can be extraordinarily lethal. Winds can send trees lurching into living rooms and debris hurtling through the air. Fallen power lines can cause electrocutions. Historically, storm surge—the treacherous rise of seawater as hurricane winds push waves toward shore—has been the deadliest hurricane hazard. But Helene, which did most of its killing far from the reach of the sea, is an emblem of a new trend in fatalities. From 2013 to 2022, drowning from rainfall flooding, not storm surge, was the top cause of tropical-cyclone deaths, according to data from the National Hurricane Center—and the shift is already having profound effects. For individuals, this means reassessing established wisdom about hurricane safety. And American emergency-preparedness organizations, which have spent decades working to minimize fatalities from storm surge, haven’t fully adapted to combat the new leading killer.

As with any other major storm, Helene’s lethal nature was a product of numerous variables, assembled in just the wrong way. In North Carolina, there was simply too much rain all at once. A hot summer had saturated the air with moisture. Helene conjured rains in the area days before the massive cyclone arrived in the state, and merged with other storm systems, which resulted in even more rain. The mountains gave the storm winds an extra lift, sending moisture high up into the air, where it condensed and delivered still more precipitation. Remnant showers added to the total rainfall as the storm spun away.

[Read: ‘The death toll is going to be tremendous’]

Rainfall flooding is becoming deadlier than storm surge in part because of human-caused climate change, Michael Brennan, the director of the National Hurricane Center, told me. The warmer the ocean, the more moisture a hurricane can suck up. The warmer our atmosphere, the more moisture it can lend to a cyclone. Climate change may also be allowing storms to retain their strength farther inland than they would have otherwise—which means more of the U.S. might be vulnerable to the extreme rain they bring. “Anywhere it can rain, it can flood,” Brennan said. In the days since Helene, researchers have attempted to quantify climate change’s influence on the severity of the storm. One preliminary estimate, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, suggests that climate change may have caused up to 50 percent more rain to fall in some parts of the Carolinas and Georgia.

As Helene approached, North Carolinians expected rain and flash floods, but no mass-evacuation orders were issued. Buncombe County, home to Asheville and one of the worst-affected counties in North Carolina, relies on outdated flood maps from 2010 for its emergency planning, so officials may not have had the tools to appropriately warn residents in the highest-risk zones. And the mountainous, heavily wooded west of the state lacks the kind of evacuation infrastructure that is standard on the coast, including signage about exit routes. “Doing a mass hurricane evacuation right on the Gulf Coast is difficult enough, and there you have communities that have a cultural memory of evacuating,” says Samantha Montano, an emergency-management professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and the author of Disasterology: Dispatches From the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis. When the rivers started overflowing and the rain kept coming, it was likely already too late to leave. The deluge weakened the soil, triggering cascading landslides that crumpled homes and roads.

[Read: Hurricane Helene created a 30-foot chasm of earth on my street]

Despite these failures of preparation, the response to the storm likely saved many lives. Hurricane Katrina, for example, claimed an estimated 1,400 lives in 2005 in part because of the federal government’s abysmal reaction. Compared with the Helene response, “it’s a night-and-day difference,” Montano told me. (Not every recent U.S. hurricane has resulted in appropriate aid: The federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria in 2017 was slow, and far too small in proportion to the destruction Puerto Rico suffered. About 3,000 people were killed.) Official decisions made before Katrina arrived also contributed to the casualty list: Despite alarming forecasts, New Orleans waited to issue evacuation orders until less than a day before the hurricane made landfall. And when the advisory went out, many residents of the city, which has some of the worst income disparities in the country, were unable to leave. Then, of course, New Orleans’s aging levees broke, submerging most of the city.

Storm-related deaths in the U.S., including from storm surge, have declined in recent decades, largely owing to advancements in forecasting and improvements in emergency management, Montano told me. But at the same time, a new threat has risen to the top. Meeting it, Brennan said, is “still a work in progress.” Updated flood maps are in the works in Buncombe County but won’t be ready until the end of next year. The National Weather Service, which houses the National Hurricane Center, has rolled out new flood-mapping services covering about 30 percent of the U.S., and expects to have data available for the entire country by 2026. In the meantime, Brennan said, evacuation notices should target people who live farther inland, who are at greater risk from hurricane weather than they might have been 40 years ago.

[Read: America needs a disaster corps]

Calculating the true toll of Helene’s wrath will take years. Hundreds of people are still missing. And official tallies don’t always factor in the deaths that follow in the months to come, caused by a shortage of drinkable water, electricity, and medical assistance. One study of U.S. tropical cyclones from 1930 to 2015, published yesterday, found that storms can contribute hundreds of additional deaths for as many as 15 years after they strike, because of stress, financial difficulties that prevent people from getting health care, and other long-term hardships.

The Southern Appalachian Mountains were supposed to be resilient against many effects of climate change. The area is cooler than other parts of the South. It is not usually subject to the winds that threaten coastal communities every time a hurricane comes through. But in the aftermath of Helene, the region has proved vulnerable to at least one danger that climate change is amplifying. It could not escape our moisture-laden skies or the fury they are poised to unleash.

North Carolina Was Set Up for Disaster

2024-09-30T13:48:41-04:00

When Helene swept through western North Carolina late last week, the rain fell heavy and fast enough to start washing away mountainsides. Rivers overflowed, and a chunk of one of the state’s major highways collapsed, cutting off communities; floods slung mud and muck into buildings. Cars, trucks, dumpsters, entire homes and bridges—these and more were carried away in the floods as if they weighed nothing. Much of what managed to stay in place became submerged in brown water. Thousands of people in Asheville remain without power, and boil-water advisories are in effect; evidence suggests that the city’s water system was severely damaged. Asheville’s River Arts District has been destroyed. At least 35 people in the region have died, and with cell service down, hundreds more are unaccounted for.

When a hurricane barrels toward land, “we really focus on the coast,” Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist in Miami, told me as Helene headed toward the continental United States. But the inland impact “can’t be overstated,” especially in heavily wooded areas, where fallen trees can exacerbate the destruction. Before the giant hurricane even came ashore, North Carolina had endured a miserable amount of rainfall. On Friday morning, rivers in western North Carolina were already at record levels, and officials for a time feared that a dam at Lake Lure, which is surrounded by dense forest, would fail. Helene had weakened to a tropical storm by the time it reached the mountains, but this much more water was simply too much.

Excessive rainfall can weaken soil and force once-sturdy ground to slide away with terrifying swiftness; scientists have linked both extreme rainfall and increased risk of landslides to climate change. (A recent study found, for instance, that the rainfall that triggered a series of landslides in India this summer, killing hundreds, was made 10 percent heavier as a result of human-caused climate change.) That Helene affected western North Carolina so dramatically may force more people to incorporate those dynamics into their understanding of climate effects. For years, climate scientists warned that rising sea levels would worsen coastal flooding during hurricanes, and indeed, Helene broke storm-surge records along Florida’s Gulf Coast, some of which were set only a year ago. But one of the places still reeling most dramatically from Helene’s wrath are the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Helene bore some of the hallmarks of a hurricane in a too-warm world, such as rapid intensification. The hurricane drew fuel from abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, which likely helped extend the storm’s life. A study examining hurricanes that made landfall between 1967 and 2018, for example, found that modern-day hurricanes extend farther inland because they contain more moisture collected during their journey over warmer seas. Hurricanes are now decaying at a slower rate after traveling inland.

As some powerful hurricanes are known to do, Helene generated wet weather in North Carolina that arrived far ahead of the main system. This particular storm front delivered enough rain to prompt a rare advisory from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about flood risk in urban areas including parts of the southern Appalachians. The rains “have left the grounds saturated and the river tributaries running high,” and the coming deluge was only going to make things worse, “even well after landfall,” the agency warned as Helene approached.

The flooding that followed has drawn comparisons to Asheville’s dramatic 1916 flood, brought on by back-to-back tropical storms, which killed 80 people and stood as the city’s benchmark for all subsequent flooding events. That flood “carved away the ground under mountain railroad passes, leaving tracks looking like sky-high trapeze rigs,” according to one historical account. These types of disasters don’t depend only on human-caused warming: Severe precipitation will always be influenced by natural weather patterns and happenstance. But climate change is opening the tap wider.

When temperatures rise, more water evaporates from Earth’s surface and its oceans. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and that excess moisture can contribute to more frequent and intense rainfall. Such conditions are supercharging rainy weather, tropical storms, and Category 4 hurricanes alike. A passing hurricane can wreak even more havoc if the land below is already soaked and its waterways are filled to the brim. A mountainous and temperate region such as western North Carolina might not have to worry as much about rising seas or scorching temperatures—Asheville has been described as a climate haven because it seems relatively protected from the most commonly cited effects of global warming, such as extreme heat and hurricane winds. But these places still have to contend with excessive rain and the resulting landslides, a deadly combination of land and water that can make the ground slip out from under whole communities.

As the floodwaters in North Carolina recede, more storms are already brewing in the Atlantic, with forecasters tracking which cyclones may pose a threat to the Gulf Coast. If a storm strengthens into a hurricane and makes landfall, it will become the fifth hurricane to reach the U.S. mainland this year, rivaling the record of six landfalls in a single season. There doesn’t appear to be a connection between climate effects and landfalls, but too many landfalls is worrying because the storms that arrive are stronger than they should be. Parts of the Southeast still cleaning up after Helene may be walloped again, with waves crashing on their doorstep as if the sea itself were knocking. One stretch of coastal Florida was still recovering from two other hurricanes when Helene swept through. Two months remain in the Atlantic hurricane season. It may still render communities inundated and stranded, with water so high that it is difficult to fathom how it can drain away, and what will remain once it does.

America’s Hurricane Luck Is Running Out

2024-09-27T12:56:26-04:00

From high above, Hurricane Helene’s swirling clouds seem to have taken a piece of the United States and swallowed it whole. Helene, which made landfall last night as a Category 4 storm, has drenched the Southeast from the tip of Florida all the way up to North Carolina. Even though it weakened to a tropical storm this morning, streets have transformed into rivers, dams are threatening to fail, and more flooding is still to come. At least 22 people have died in the Southeast. Millions are without power. Florida’s Big Bend region, where Helene came ashore, had never faced such a strong hurricane in recorded history.

Helene arrived during an Atlantic hurricane season that forecasters had predicted would be unprecedented, thanks to record-warm ocean temperatures proffering extra fuel for storms. Since Hurricane Beryl swept over the Gulf Coast in July, the season has been quieter so far than the most dire expectations—but still unusually intense for Americans living in hurricane country. On average, one or two hurricanes make landfall in the U.S. per season. Helene is the fourth to come ashore on the Gulf Coast this year. This has only occurred a handful of times since the mid-1800s, with six as the record for landfalls on the U.S. mainland in a single season. This season isn’t over yet, so topping that record isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

“I wouldn’t make too much of that other than bad luck,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami, told me of the season’s landfall count so far. Helene and most other storms this season have emerged in the western part of the Atlantic basin, which has always been more favorable for storm growth and increases the likelihood of landfall, McNoldy said. Climate change isn’t to blame for where a hurricane touches down, or if it does at all. But Helene’s strength is a different kind of bad luck—a variety that we humans inadvertently engineered. Many of the hurricanes that do reach land these days are more intense because of oceans warmed by climate change. Decades ago, Helene might have become a medium-size storm—still destructive, but not a beast. This hurricane is a sign of America’s relentless hurricane seasons to come.

[Read: America’s fingers-crossed strategy for hurricane season]

For months now, the waters in the Gulf of Mexico have been abnormally hot, spiking several degrees over the past decade’s average temperatures. “It is simply not within or even close to the range of natural variability to have water temperatures this far above normal in the Gulf, over this wide of an area, to that deep of a depth,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Florida who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me. “When the other ingredients you need to form a hurricane are present, the results are explosive.” In Helene’s case, those other ingredients included the state of hurricane-slowing winds (low) and hurricane-bolstering moisture in the air (plenty), Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, told me. Its massive size was also due to happenstance—a low-pressure system that spun over the Caribbean and Central America a few days before Helene reached the Gulf Coast. Such vortexes are quite common around this time of year, Klotzbach said.

These and other factors can make or break a hurricane. If the atmosphere is too dry, or if the wind shear is too intense, storms may never spin their way into Category 1. The problem is that, when atmospheric conditions allow a storm to form, our warming, moistening world is poised to grow them into major threats. “Even 100 years ago, the Gulf would have been plenty warm to support a hurricane of Helene’s strength,” Klotzbach said. But in this century, the chances of this particular outcome are simply higher. Gulf waters may certainly be cooler than average in some years, and perhaps that will be the case next year, which is forecast to be less scorching overall. “But the odds of that go down with continued climate change,” Klotzbach said.

[Read: Hurricane Beryl is a terrifying omen]

Global warming doesn’t dictate whether storms like Beryl and Helene exist, but as Earth continues to heat up, more and more of the disasters that arrive on our shores will bear our fingerprints. “You hope, when you go into these years where the forecasts are really high, that maybe we’ll luck out; maybe we won’t get the big hurricane hits,” Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist in Miami, told me. So far, the opposite situation is unfolding. And we still have two more months to go.

When I spoke with Truchelut at the start of the season, as Beryl strengthened in the Caribbean, he invoked the importance of chance in avoiding a nightmare hurricane, warning that “we might not be so lucky next time.” This week, Truchelut’s personal luck held out: Even as parts of Florida experienced a historic storm surge—the deadliest aspect of hurricanes, and one that is expected to worsen as sea levels rise—Tallahassee, where Truchelut is based, seems to have been spared. The more Atlantic storms make landfall as hurricanes, the greater the chances that each American town or city will face disasters shaped by a combination of natural misfortune and human-made blight. In our warming world, it seems that hurricane country won’t be able to catch a break.

How to Cool the World Without Blocking the Sun

2024-09-20T07:15:00-04:00

In the fall of 1993, a ship sailed into the Pacific Ocean carrying nearly 1,000 pounds of iron crystals packed into barrels, then dumped it all into the waves. The next morning, the water was tinged a subtle green from newly sprouted phytoplankton. The microorganisms, which need iron to grow, draw carbon dioxide out of the air as they metabolize. Scientists already knew that Earth’s atmosphere was swelling with the gas, and that the planet would soon be in desperate need of cooling down. So why not grow more of the tiny beings that could help? John Martin, the oceanographer who pioneered the idea, put it this way: “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.” (He was joking, but not entirely.)

Fertilizing the ocean with iron is a form of geoengineering, a set of technologies that are compelling for their potential to meaningfully alter Earth’s systems, and controversial for the same reason. These days, some geoengineering techniques, such as spraying chemicals into the sky to encourage clouds to produce more rain and ease drought, are already in use. Scientists have begun real-world demonstrations of “cloud brightening,” misting the skies with sea salt to dial up how much sunlight clouds reflect. And even the more controversial approaches—such as injecting the stratosphere with shiny sulfur compounds to block the sun’s rays—are becoming part of mainstream climate discussions. All of these methods are of undetermined efficacy, involve unknown risk, and may entail unintended consequences.

As the planet heats, geoengineering is poised to manipulate it in unprecedented ways, whether researchers invent machines to suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or nudge microorganisms to do it for them. Tinkering with home-grown plankton sounds like a less dramatic approach than, say, putting a massive parasol in outer space to shade the planet from the light of its star. But the field is so new that scientists don’t yet know whether geoengineering with microorganisms would really be a gentler form of climate intervention. Microbes, after all, play enormously consequential roles in the world around us and within us—I should credit the trillions in my body as co-authors of this story. For the best chance of keeping Earth livable, scientists need to understand exactly how the microscopic creatures around us might be useful, and perhaps even preferable to the more sci-fi approaches to cooling off the world.

Microbes, the most abundant organisms on Earth, have been cleaning up human messes since time immemorial, and more recently in ways that help sustain modern life. They decompose the contents of landfills, clean contaminants from bodies of water, break down pollutants in sewage-treatment plants, and eat away at oil spills. In large-scale climate solutions, though, microbes “are horribly underutilized and completely overlooked,” Lisa Stein, a biological-sciences professor at the University of Alberta, told me. Microbes barely factor into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports on future climate scenarios, Stein said. But she and others say they could have a major role to play in combatting human-caused climate change.

One favored approach centers on methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas that accounts for 30 percent of the rise in global temperature. Mary Lidstrom, a professor emeritus of chemical engineering and microbiology at the University of Washington, is working on genetically modifying bacteria that naturally consume methane as a food source, so that the microbes pull even more gas from the air. The bacteria, known as methanotrophs, would live inside facilities known as bioreactors, which resemble shipping containers. Such bioreactors could be positioned near known methane sources—landfills, coal mines, oil and gas wells, and wetlands—to minimize the amount of methane that makes it into the air. And they could scrub gas that is already circulating in the atmosphere, said Stein, who also serves as Canada’s research chair in climate-change microbiology. The science is still in the early stages, but someday, “it could make a difference in the rate of how fast our thermometer is going up,” she said. Researchers might also exploit carbon-eating microorganisms residing in soils, which hold more carbon than the atmosphere, by modifying soil composition to boost the bacteria’s metabolic capacity.

[Read: Playing God with the atmosphere]

Bacteria that metabolize carbon could also be of use in the ocean. Matthew Sullivan, a microbiology professor at the Ohio State University, is studying marine viruses that infect such microbes, and influence the way they process carbon. “I’m a fan of leveraging the billions of years of work nature has already done,” Sullivan told me. Perhaps, he said, certain viruses can nudge these bacteria to convert carbon into its heaviest forms. The bacteria would ideally cluster together and sink to the ocean floor, taking the carbon with them so it can’t raise the global temperature.

Scaling up any kind of climate engineering is tricky. Significantly slowing warming caused by methane, for example, would require about 50,000 to 300,000 of Lidstrom’s bioreactors to be active for 20 years. And the downstream effects are difficult to predict, let alone contain. A substance deposited in one plot of land to alter its soil could spread to an entirely different ecosystem, through runoff or some other method, and potentially spoil its happy equilibrium. Similarly, an influx of iron in the South Pacific Ocean could have ramifications for other regions of the world’s seas. Jay Lennon, a biology professor at Indiana University Bloomington, told me that meddling with viruses, too, could have unintended consequences: “Is there going to be a corresponding bloom of viruses that kill off all those phytoplankton and release the carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere?” Such questions are important to consider, but human interventions influence Earth’s microbes all the time, Ruth Varner, a biogeochemistry professor at the University of New Hampshire, told me. For example, every use of fertilizer in agriculture counts as microbial modification. “These are places that we’ve manipulated already,” Varner said.

Much attention is paid to the possibility of geoengineering’s unintended consequences, but there’s nearly as much uncertainty about intended effects. Scientists don’t know for sure how potent many of these concepts will prove to be, including those that have already been tested outside a laboratory. The ship expeditions of the 1990s, for example, didn't stick around very long; the journeys were expensive, and scientists couldn’t remain at sea to determine what exactly was happening in the depths, David Kirchman, a marine biologist at the University of Delaware, told me. Carbon stolen out of the atmosphere should remain buried for at least a century for maximum impact, he said. Yet it’s entirely possible that if the phytoplankton doesn’t sink to deep enough waters, “it just gets eaten back up by the organisms in the surface ocean, and that CO2 just returns to the atmosphere.”

[Read: We’re gambling with the only good oceans in the universe]

Scientists haven’t attempted large-scale ocean iron-fertilization experiments since 2012, but the research may soon make a comeback. A pair of researchers are using new funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to model the effectiveness of the technique. There are no sailing trips on the horizon, and yet, microbe research may quickly arrive at the same precipice as other kinds of geoengineering efforts. Real stewardship of Earth’s future lies beyond climate hacks, in making a meaningful shift away from fossil fuels. But the hotter the planet gets, the more attractive geoengineering will likely seem. “Short of large-scale behavioral changes across the planet, we do seem to be committing ourselves to an engineered solution on our current trajectories,” Sullivan said. We might have to decide, sooner than we think, which godlike levers we need to pull, large or small.

The Scariest Spacewalk in 50 Years

2024-09-10T07:45:20-04:00

Early this morning, four private astronauts blasted into orbit to carry out SpaceX’s most dangerous mission yet. After a few days of circling Earth, the passengers will suit up and open the hatch of their spaceship. All of the precious, breathable air inside their capsule will escape into the cold void. Two of them will venture out, gripping an exterior ladder with their gloved hands as they dangle over the planet. All four will be exposed to the vacuum of space, and they will rely on their spacesuits, which SpaceX has never tested in space before, to keep them alive. It will be the first civilian spacewalk in history—and perhaps the riskiest spacewalk in decades.

The mission, known as Polaris Dawn, is a throwback to the early days of American spaceflight. Before NASA developed airlock technology—the small compartment that separates the livable environment within a spaceship from the inhospitable one without—the country’s space capsules subjected the whole crew to the vacuum during spacewalks. SpaceX is returning to the older style because a private citizen, the billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, wants to do a spacewalk. Isaacman is funding the mission, so the company has an incentive to cater to his space dreams, however wild. But SpaceX also has a history of moving fast and breaking things to achieve its own ambitious goals and, given customers with attitudes to match, is racking up firsts in private spaceflight. The company could start looking less like it’s replaying NASA’s greatest hits and more like it’s lapping the venerated space agency—as long as its passengers make it back home.

Isaacman previously chartered a SpaceX mission in 2021, the first orbital trip without government astronauts. In 2022, he commissioned SpaceX for three more, essentially starting his own private spaceflight program guided by a lifelong interest in space exploration and a penchant for high-flying firsts: As a young pilot, Isaacman broke a speed record for flying around the world. Isaacman and the rest of the crew—two SpaceX employees and one of his longtime friends, a retired Air Force pilot—have trained extensively for the journey, including simulating the emptying and refilling of air in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. But even among the most prepared professional astronauts, there are “unknowable levels of anxiety in first-time spacewalkers, and this uncertainty applies to the whole crew when there’s no airlock,” Kenneth “Taco” Cockrell, a retired NASA shuttle astronaut, told me. Even if spacewalkers are cool as cucumbers, time and breathable air are both finite during a spacewalk, and serious malfunctions in their suits, ship, or life-support systems could be deadly.

Isaacman is aware of the potential dangers, but seems largely unbothered by them. “It is not without risk, and you’re taking that risk because you want to advance the ball forward, things that help SpaceX open up this frontier for everyone,” Isaacman told CBS News in a recent interview. Someone was eventually going to perform the first private spacewalk, so why not now, and why not him?

[Read: America’s new vision of astronauts]

In pictures of the first American spacewalk, from 1965, NASA astronaut Ed White looks like the epitome of a space cowboy, hovering unsupported over Earth, the tether attaching him like a lasso to the Gemini capsule floating in front of him. What the image doesn’t capture is how harrowing White’s experience was. White and the other astronaut on the mission, James McDivitt, struggled with nearly every aspect of the walk: opening the hatch, wrangling the tangle of cords once White was back inside, closing the hatch. Later, on Earth, White described the final 30-second battle with the door as “probably the most dramatic moment of my life.” Both astronauts “were near exhausted,” Carroll “Pete” Woodling, the NASA chief for crew safety and procedures at the time, recalled in an interview in 2000. NASA would have lost both men if they hadn’t managed to seal that door. A year later, Gene Cernan found it nearly impossible to move around when his spacesuit stiffened in the vacuum of space. On top of that, the early space capsules lacked handholds and footholds on the outside, which made maneuvering extremely strenuous. When Cernan was finally back in, the space historian Michael Neufeld has written, “he looked as red as a boiled lobster.”

Polaris Dawn seems even more hair-raising when you consider that the Dragon wasn’t designed for spacewalks. Yes, it has ferried plenty of astronauts to and from the International Space Station in recent years, but those passengers have always remained cozily enclosed inside the vehicle until it docked with the ISS. Dragon has no airlock, and SpaceX engineers have had to modify the capsule for this mission, including boosting its oxygen reserves so all four suits have enough air to last through the entire two-hour event.

According to Isaacman, Polaris Dawn has incorporated some crucial improvements on the old-fashioned spacewalks. He and his fellow spacewalker, Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX astronaut trainer, will keep their feet on the ladder. The Dragon spacecraft bears a motorized system to help the astronauts handle the hatch. And compared with what White and Cernan wore, the SpaceX suit is a garment of science fiction, sleek and tight-fitting, with a helmet that displays the performance stats of the suit to the wearer. Hopefully it will not transform into, as Cernan described his own outfit, “a rusty suit of armor” in the vacuum of space. Polaris Dawn is a first-of-its-kind experiment, though, and these features don’t guarantee an easy spacewalk—nothing can.

Commercial spaceflight was always going to introduce new shades of risk to leaving Earth. If the Polaris attempt goes wrong, it will become one more entry in the perpetually growing catalog of wealthy individuals choosing the wrong extreme adventure. If it succeeds, then SpaceX gets to market spacewalks to everyone. And, with the help of its most loyal customer, it will further cement its status as the preeminent space company in America. A successful demonstration of SpaceX’s extravehicular-activity suits could put the company ahead of even NASA. The spacesuits that NASA uses on the International Space Station are more than 40 years old and regularly give astronauts trouble. Just this summer, NASA called off a spacewalk before the astronauts even left the ISS’s airlock, when Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit sprang a water leak. NASA has also struggled to develop suits for its future moonwalkers, who are supposed to land on the lunar surface before the end of the decade—never mind outfits that could help extend human presence even deeper into the solar system. If SpaceX’s designs prove themselves up to this challenge, the company will have the most desirable suits in the business.

[Read: Elon Musk to the rescue]

SpaceX’s influence on America’s spacefaring agenda grows stronger each year, setting the example—and providing the technology—for what the country might be capable of in this century. The same may soon be true of SpaceX’s customers. Isaacman has offered to use the mission after Polaris Dawn to raise the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope, which sinks a little closer to Earth each year, in order to extend its life span—an operation that would involve spacewalking. NASA hasn’t taken Isaacman up on the offer yet, but if it does, the agency will cede one more unit of power to the commercial space sector, and to a single wealthy American with visions of grandeur.

In the coming years, SpaceX customers may dream of using Dragon to clean up space junk, or to refuel a space telescope that has run out of gas, or to simply float untethered from a spacecraft because Bruce McCandless looked cool doing it in 1988. SpaceX likes to portray itself as a mission-driven company, whose employees have bought into its ultimate dream, but it is still a company, where customers will be able to pay handsomely for the chance to risk their lives. What Isaacman is pulling isn’t just a stunt, but it has some elements of one: the risk, the questionable rationale, the bid for personal glory. He’s inaugurating a true cowboy era in spaceflight. Now the daring astronauts are not employees spacewalking for the glory of their country and planet, but customers buying into danger for their own reasons—and still steering the course of our cosmic future.

Elon Musk Has the ‘Off’ Switch

2024-09-05T13:57:32-04:00

Since Starlink first beamed down to Brazil two years ago, hundreds of communities in the Amazon that were previously off the grid found themselves connected to the rest of the world. Here was the purest promise of SpaceX’s satellite internet—to provide connectivity in even the most remote places on Earth—fulfilled. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, received a medal from the Brazilian government. But now Starlink’s Brazilian service is tangled in a mess of political tensions, court orders, personal insults, and threats to revoke the company’s license to operate in the country. And this drama all started because of another Musk business that links strangers around the globe: X, née Twitter.

For months, X and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes have been publicly feuding over Moraes’s order that X suspend dozens of user accounts, including many belonging to right-wing politicians and pundits, as part of what the judge has called a campaign against online disinformation. Musk has largely ignored the demands, accusing de Moraes of censoring conservative voices. He kept ignoring it even as the court levied fines against X and froze Starlink’s Brazilian financial assets in an attempt to pressure any Musk-owned company to pay the penalties. The fight reached a boil in recent days, when de Moraes instructed internet providers in Brazil to cut off access to X altogether and Musk refused to block the site on Starlink until the latter business got its accounts back.

In some ways, this is classic Musk, scuffling with government agencies when he believes they’re infringing on his enterprises. “What a scumbag!” Musk posted about de Moraes yesterday, after Starlink reversed course and agreed to block X (and pursue legal action over the locked assets). But in other ways, the debacle is a microcosm of fraught, ongoing debates over free speech and internet regulation around the world. Musk isn’t the clear villain here: His actions could be seen as a necessary corrective to government overreach. But they seem less magnanimous when you consider that the alternative to government overreach is, apparently, a World Wide Web governed by the whims of the world’s richest man.

This particular feud has crystallized an unsettling truth that is growing more apparent each day: Musk is becoming an internet god. Space-based internet and social media are a potent combination, and their control by a single person is quite unprecedented—and alarming in the same manner as a federal government restricting online speech via sweeping decree. Not only can Musk now determine who gains traction on a small but influential corner of the web; in certain corners of the globe, he can also determine who has access to the internet at all, and regulate what people encounter when they use it.

[Renée DiResta: Elon Musk is fighting for attention, not free speech]

For a service that took off only about five years ago, Starlink has become impressively ubiquitous, available for use on all seven continents. Musk dispatched terminals to places reeling from natural disasters, and then to the front lines of war. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it hacked the satellite provider that the Ukrainian military relied on for communications. Ukrainian officials appealed to Musk for help, and SpaceX dispatched truckloads of Starlink terminals to the besieged country, for free. Soon, Musk found himself with immense decision-making power, as Ukrainian authorities pleaded with him to activate Starlink over a port city in Crimea, apparently so that they could conduct a surprise drone attack on the Russian fleet anchored there. By the end of the war’s first year, when SpaceX no longer wanted to foot the bill for Starlink operations, the Pentagon jumped to take over the job before SpaceX could cut off access. As one undersecretary told The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue.”

Last year, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted Musk for a visit, the billionaire looked—and played—the part of a world leader traveling to a war zone. He toured a kibbutz that Hamas had attacked, dressed in a suit instead of his trademark Occupy Mars T-shirt, and offered Starlink’s services to the Israeli government. Israel has imposed internet blackouts and destroyed telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza, a common tactic in modern warfare. This summer, after lengthy negotiations, Israeli authorities allowed SpaceX to activate Starlink in one hospital in Gaza, with more service on the way. The deal resembled agreements between Israel and other world powers for humanitarian aid, but as far as we know, the United States, where SpaceX is registered, did not send Musk to the Middle East to broker it. He flew over on his private jet.

Starlink is what’s known in the satellite business as a megaconstellation. At the time of this writing—and that’s important to note, because SpaceX launches a fresh batch nearly every week—more than 6,000 operational Starlink satellites are circling Earth, accounting for more than half of all functioning satellites in orbit. (As I’ve written before, if any aliens stopped by low-Earth orbit, they would think this planet belonged to SpaceX.) Starlink has grown so large in part because SpaceX is simply the most prolific space company in the world. Other companies are working on their own internet constellations, including Amazon, but they’re lagging far behind—and none of their leaders owns prominent social-media companies, where they can govern the flow of information.

[Read: Private companies are building an exoskeleton around Earth]

Compared with SpaceX, the world’s town square, as Musk calls X, is a cauldron of chaos, especially for users. Since Musk took over Twitter, he has made it a cozy home for far-right provocateurs, reinstated the accounts of previously banned bad actors, promoted conspiracy theories, and made the website worse at separating fact from fiction. And yet, Musk believes that X is the “number 1 source of news in the world.” For a part of the world that relies on Starlink, Musk could, if he wanted, make it the only news source.

The Brazil fiasco may have led to Musk backing down, but it has also revealed just how easily he can serve Starlink users whatever content he may want. Musk’s fame, the omnipresence of his many businesses, and his growing attention to politics does not automatically translate to foreign-policy expertise. But what could Brazil—or any nation—really do to curb his control? Pummel Starlink out of the sky? Impossible; as David Burbach, a professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, once told me, “Nobody has enough anti-satellite weapons to come anywhere near shooting that down.”

[Read: One satellite crash could upend modern life]

And Starlink, which currently operates in 75 countries, is only getting bigger. A new batch of satellites went up today. SpaceX has already received approval from U.S. regulators to launch thousands more, and soon SpaceX may start launching Starlinks in even greater quantities on its giant new rocket, Starship. Musk envisions as many as 42,000 satellites orbiting Earth someday. In the next few years, more people than ever may find themselves subject to Musk’s decisions when they’re doing something as simple as sending an email. The exoskeleton of Starlink satellites surrounding Earth, invisible from the ground, will feel almost palpable, shifting with the whims of the richest person in the world, who controls it all.

The Corals That Survive Climate Change Will Be Unrecognizable

2024-08-28T09:23:06-04:00

Earth belonged to the corals first. And over hundreds of millions of years, they proved themselves remarkably good at adapting to each new version of the planet. As other groups of organisms dropped out of existence, corals endured so many catastrophes that their history reads like a biblical tale of resilience. Through extinctions mass and minor, through volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes, the corals survived.

And for tiny marine animals, they managed to exert tremendous force on the planet’s landscape. Corals have raised whole islands into existence. They are the natural guardians of coastlines; they sustain an estimated quarter of known marine life. If the reefs ringing the Maldives die, an entire nation could erode into the sea. Humans live in these places because corals exist.

The Earth that humans evolved on, in other words, is a coral planet. Today, the animals provide ecosystems that support the livelihoods of about 1 billion people. They are so fundamental to life as we know it that scientists wonder if one way humanity could discover alien life is by detecting the signature of fluorescent corals in the shallow waters of another planet. Corals are also, famously, being devastated by climate change. Even in a future where they survive in some form, their transformation could make our own experience of this planet profoundly different.

The earliest corals emerged about 500 million years ago, roughly alongside plant life on land. But the modern version of coral reefs appeared a short 4 million years ago, around the time our human ancestors began to walk upright (give or take a few million years). When researchers try to rescue suffering corals, carefully cutting pieces away and transporting them to aquariums, they’re visiting underwater metropolises that are thousands of years old. Despite all that corals have been through, given how fast conditions on Earth are changing, life has likely never been quite as stressful for them as it is now, according to the coral experts Bertrand Martin-Garin and Lucien Montaggioni in their book, Corals and Reefs.

Earlier this month, scientists reported that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is sitting in water that, in one decade, has become hotter than at any other point in the past 400 years. Caribbean coral colonies are still reeling from the havoc of last year’s historic marine heat wave. Around the world, extraordinarily hot ocean temperatures have plunged corals into one of the worst bleaching events in recorded history—they’re expelling the algae that live in their tissues and turning a ghostly white. Corals can survive bleaching, if conditions improve. But the longer they remain without that algae, the more likely they are to die.

“These are strange days on planet Earth,” Derek Manzello, a coral-reef ecologist and the coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, once told me. The planet used to give corals hundreds of thousands of years to adjust to a new reality; human activities—the burning of fossil fuels but also overfishing and pollution that have brought on global warming—have introduced a rate of change more dramatic than anything else in the geological record. “If we wanted to kill all reef-building corals on the planet, it would be hard to imagine a collection of activities quite as pointed and effective as what we’ve arrived at,” Stuart Sandin, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told me.

Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which presents science-driven predictions about the global effects of human-caused climate change, has said that if the world limits warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—the current goal, though one we’re on a path to blast past—70 to 90 percent of tropical coral reefs will disappear. And if the world surpasses 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all of them will die off.

That would not necessarily mean that Earth would lose its corals entirely. Even as we draw closer to the worst-case scenarios for corals, Manzello believes that—with concerted human intervention—some of the destruction could be still counteracted or offset, at least in certain pockets of the globe. And as urgent as the IPCC warnings are, Sandin said, such estimates don’t take into account coral’s full potential for adaptation. “We still can’t say with any certainty if we will see coral species go extinct,” Manzello said when we spoke recently. Documenting extinctions is more difficult in the marine environment than on land, and like Sandin, Manzello thinks that coral refugia—places where species have historically persisted despite stressful conditions—could persist in even the gloomiest scenarios.

Sandin, for one, predicts a future split into thirds. One-third of coral reefs will certainly be devastated in the coming decades, mostly near urban areas. Another third is “going to scrabble along,” he said, echoes of the voluminous reefs that once thrived. And the final third is “going to look pretty darn nice,” having managed to handle the worst effects of warming and become nearly unrecognizable, unlike any corals that scientists are familiar with today. Although even corals known for their heat tolerance are succumbing in the Indian Ocean, some species in the Pacific Ocean have improved their capacity to withstand the stress by hosting a different kind of algae. Reefs have started cropping up in subtropical environments, too, where the water is cooler. “We’ve seen a lot of incredible locations where these reefs are rising from ashes, living in places that they shouldn’t,” Sandin said. “Those reefs are just fighting like hell.” Earth could keep its corals, long into the future.

Scientists, too, are fighting hard, but to save corals as we know them now. “The entire coral-reef-science community went through a huge, drastic shift in focus starting in the 1980s, when we first saw large-scale bleaching events emerge,” Manzello said. Before that, scientists studied corals out of pure curiosity about how these creatures came to be; now every aspect of coral research has turned to finding ways to preserve the animals. “If you’re a geologist and you want to study reef development 200 million years ago in Papua New Guinea, you’re going to have to tie that to, what is this going to tell us about the future of reefs?” Manzello said.

In a sense, the coral crisis is existential for humans, too. Even if coral cities persist in some fashion, what will ours be without those ecosystems? Fishing industries will suffer, and food supply with it. Familiar shorelines will slough off into the sea. Coastal communities will be at the mercy of powerful waves once slowed by reefs. A world with suffering corals leaves humans more exposed to the elements—and those elements are becoming more dangerous each year.

With every passing too-hot month, we turn more reefs into ruins, the remnants of another life form that existed alongside ours. Alive, some corals in shallow waters shimmer: They absorb ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which can prohibit growth in other organisms, and then emit it as visible light, in beautiful colors. That ability is what has made scientists imagine finding corals far beyond the solar system: Several years ago, Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer and the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, suggested that scientists could search for signs of coral-like life forms on planets orbiting stars much smaller and dimmer than our own, that release ultraviolet flares. Perhaps life on those planets evolved to use that radiation, just as corals have. The glowing populations would have to be far more widespread than they are on Earth to give off a detectable signal; astronomers have already thought of the kind of telescope that could detect this glow, though it’s still many years away from creation.

Should alien astronomers ever look our way, they wouldn’t detect Earth’s fluorescent corals at the water’s surface, Kaltenegger told me: There aren’t enough of them. Any faraway civilizations are more likely to capture the perpetual illumination of human cities, or the radio waves from our inventions, flowing endlessly into space. But if corals were here long before us, they may also outlast us, despite the torment they’re experiencing now. Many, many years from now, “after humans have had their reign, corals will be fine if we give the ocean a break,” Sandin said. People may not bear witness, but corals’ dramatic resilience could survive us, too.

Elon Musk to the Rescue

2024-08-25T11:52:37-04:00

When the astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams launched to the International Space Station on June 5, they flew on a Boeing spacecraft and wore the company’s bright-blue spacesuits. On the way home, eight months after their scheduled return, they will likely ride in a SpaceX vehicle, dressed in sleek white suits designed with the aesthetic sensibilities of that company’s CEO and chief engineer in mind. Elon Musk to the rescue.

The two NASA astronauts were supposed to come home after just eight days. Instead, they have been stuck for 81 days on the ISS in a weightless limbo. They were—and still are—fine; the station has plenty of supplies, and work to keep them busy. The question keeping them there has been whether Starliner, the Boeing spacecraft that brought them, was capable of bringing them back. This mission was a test-drive, the first time Starliner had carried people to space, and its thrusters malfunctioned en route to the station. Weeks of tests have not made clear whether the spacecraft can return without the propulsion system sputtering again, which could keep Wilmore and Williams from making it through the atmosphere and back to Earth.

NASA has spent billions of dollars so that it could have two commercial companies, Boeing and SpaceX, transporting astronauts on its behalf. Yesterday, NASA leaders announced that they don’t believe Starliner can bring Wilmore and Williams back safely. SpaceX, Boeing’s competitor, which has been ferrying astronauts to and from the space station for the past four years—no longer a scruffy start-up but a trusted government partner—will bring the astronauts home instead, in February of next year.

NASA hesitated over this decision for weeks, weighing the question of the astronauts’ safety and the best alternative to Boeing—demonstrating just how much America’s space agency has come to depend on SpaceX, and, for better or worse, Musk. Right now, NASA has no other reliable way to send people to space from U.S. soil, and, with Boeing’s flop, no prospect of a second option for potentially years to come.

In many ways, SpaceX is just another aerospace contractor, although right now a very successful one. NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX at the same time to develop spacecraft to carry astronauts to the ISS, a job the U.S. had previously outsourced to Russia. SpaceX completed its own crewed test flight in 2020 and has been doing the job alone ever since. It has been responsible for more launches in recent years than any other provider in the business. When its fleet of rockets was grounded for a couple of weeks this summer after a rare mishap, the missions facing potential launch delays included a cargo run to the ISS, a private astronaut trip, and a science mission to one of Jupiter’s moons. Its newest rocket, Starship, is the backbone of NASA’s plan to return American astronauts to the surface of the moon by the end of this decade; how hard Musk pushes his engineers to make it work will determine exactly when American astronauts touch the lunar surface. The company has become indispensable to the future of the American space program.

SpaceX is also inextricable from Musk, and his ethos fuels the company like rocket propellant. His singular talents drove the firm to pull off incredible feats, landing reusable rockets upright instead of dumping them into the ocean, as was the industry standard. Just a few years ago, these types of accomplishments dominated his public image as a visionary genius who inspired Hollywood’s portrayal of Iron Man. But recently, he’s given his competing persona—a right-leaning troll with an inflammatory public monologue—greater rein. In the past months, he’s prominently cast himself as a MAGA influencer who banters with Donald Trump on the social-networking site he’s stripped of safeguards against harassment and misinformation.

Musk has enough influence and power that the U.S. government cannot always ignore his provocations. Last November, the White House accused Musk of promoting “antisemitic and racist hate” on X, for instance. And Musk has occasionally gotten into hot water with NASA; in 2018, his pot-filled appearance on the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast riled officials enough to conduct a review of SpaceX’s workplace culture. Nothing came of it, and it’s hard to imagine what Musk would need to do to truly damage SpaceX’s working relationship with NASA. America has become dependent on the richest man on Earth for launch services, internet satellites, and moon landings, for as long as he runs SpaceX. Dissatisfied Twitter users could leave the social network after Musk took it over. But the U.S. government can’t quit SpaceX unless it’s willing to cede its reign as the top spacefaring nation—and, in the case of a botched mission like Starliner, leave its astronauts stranded in orbit.

NASA’s options for bringing Wilmore and Williams home must have looked grim. Choosing SpaceX meant Boeing had failed, but choosing Boeing only to have it fail more spectacularly could have been a more dramatic debacle. Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, told reporters yesterday that the lessons of the Challenger and Columbia disasters, which together killed 14 people, were front of mind. “The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety,” Nelson told reporters.

Boeing was once NASA’s preferred contractor for the job of bringing astronauts to the ISS, in part because NASA leaders thought that SpaceX’s lower bid for the job was unrealistic, according to Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator who described the events in her memoir. Both companies eventually spent more than they expected. But Boeing has experienced setbacks at nearly every stage of development. When Wilmore and Williams launched in June, both NASA and Boeing projected the sense that all of that was behind them. Officials were beaming, and ebullient in their remarks to the public: Finally, after years of delays, Boeing was on the right track, and on its way to catching up with SpaceX. Now NASA managers sound like deflated parachutes, and Boeing executives have stopped attending press conferences altogether. (NASA said that Boeing engineers still believe that Starliner is safe to fly.)

Even after extensive testing with replicas on the ground this summer, engineers can’t understand the cause of Starliner’s current problem, those faulty thrusters. Nevertheless, Nelson says that Boeing will fly astronauts again. NASA previously asked Boeing to conduct a do-over of an uncrewed flight, after Starliner failed to reach the ISS on its first attempt. Two and a half years elapsed before Boeing completed a successful uncrewed mission. If another couple of years pass before NASA feels ready to put more astronauts on Starliner, Boeing may find itself barely contributing to the country’s astronaut commutes. The ISS is scheduled to be decommissioned and deorbited in 2030. The station will plunge into the ocean, torn from orbit by a spacecraft specially designed to take it down. NASA has already hired SpaceX to take care of that too.

Boeing Has Created the Flight Delay to End All Flight Delays

2024-08-08T12:10:40-04:00

Imagine that you’re traveling for work this summer, somewhere far from home. The flight over is a little turbulent, but you’re excited to be away for a week or so. Then your return journey gets delayed. The airline puts you up in a nice hotel but can’t decide on a new departure date. Your employer booked the tickets, so you can’t do much about the situation. You start running out of clean clothes, and everyone back home starts wondering when you’re coming back.

After two months, your bosses share new travel information. They think they can send you home soon, and on the same airline. Or they might have to book another carrier, and if that’s the case, then hang in there: That flight is scheduled for next year. You’ll land eight months—months!—after you left.

This is an absurd scenario, but it is playing out right now 250 miles above Earth, with two NASA astronauts on the International Space Station. Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams took off in Starliner, a Boeing-built spacecraft, in early June. NASA had assigned them to test-drive the new spacecraft before the agency cleared Boeing to conduct regular missions shuttling crews to ISS. The astronauts were prepared to encounter some surprises, which are par for the course in a new vehicle. But Boeing’s first crewed mission has now unraveled so badly that NASA is seriously considering whether Starliner is capable of bringing Wilmore and Williams home at all—and trying to decide if the astronauts should return on SpaceX’s Dragon instead.

NASA officials said yesterday that they’ll make a final decision later this month, after weighing Starliner’s chances of safely delivering the spacefarers back to Earth. The effort to get Starliner to and from the ISS was rife with technical issues before Wilmore and Williams even launched; now Boeing’s already tenuous reputation as a capable aerospace company hangs in the balance. The company is supposed to be a competitor to SpaceX, which has been flying NASA astronauts to and from the space station without incident for several years. But if Boeing can’t recover from this saga, Elon Musk’s company may have a monopoly on astronaut-transportation services. NASA has invested billions of dollars in the two companies so they can serve as backup to each other. The agency likely never expected to face that scenario so soon, or the possibility that one private company could end up dominating American spaceflight in the post-space-shuttle era.

Of all the places to be stuck waiting for a flight home, the space station is not the worst—gorgeous views, endless weightlessness, no crowds. Wilmore and Williams are helping the other crew members on board with science research and station maintenance. And they said they’re loving the extra time in orbit. After all, they’re both close enough to retirement that this may be their last NASA voyage. The real drama is unfolding on the ground, where NASA and Boeing appear to be in disagreement over the best path forward. The teams have spent several weeks trying to figure out whether some of Starliner’s thrusters, which malfunctioned when the spacecraft approached the ISS for docking, would work properly on a return journey. Some test results have been “a bit of a surprise to us,” Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial-crew program, told reporters yesterday, and “upped the level of discomfort”—not exactly what anyone would hope to hear. Neither is what Stich said next, which is that engineers lack a “total understanding of the physics of what’s happening” in the thrusters when their Teflon seals expand, blocking the flow of propellant.

The Boeing team feels confident that Starliner can complete its mission, even with uncertainty surrounding the propulsion system, but some at NASA aren’t so sure, Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said at the press conference. During a meeting of NASA officials this week, “we heard from a lot of folks that had concerns, and the decision was not clear,” Bowersox said. NASA will make the final call, not Boeing; a committee from the commercial-crew program will recommend a course of action to Bowersox, and the decision could go all the way up to the space agency’s administrator.

If NASA decides to tap in SpaceX, the next Dragon mission would launch in late September with two astronauts instead of the initially planned four. Those astronauts would remain on the ISS for a regular six-month stay, and then Wilmore and Williams would come home with them in February 2025. Starliner would come home in early September, on its own.

That scenario would amount to major embarrassment for Boeing, and cast doubt on the future of the Starliner program. Boeing stretched to make it to the launchpad this year, let alone into orbit. The program has been plagued by poor oversight, technical issues, and schedule delays, including a required do-over when Boeing’s uncrewed test failed to reach the ISS in 2019. NASA’s second-in-command, Pam Melroy, once described the successful completion of Starliner objectives as “existential” for Boeing. Assuming the spacecraft makes it back, it is scheduled to undergo NASA reviews to approve it for regular service, but how that process will shake out if the vehicle comes back empty is unclear. Perhaps Boeing could address the issues this mission revealed and meaningfully contribute to astronaut commutes before 2030, when space agencies plan to decommission and deorbit the ISS. Or perhaps SpaceX alone will ferry spacefarers around. If anything breaks, and it can—SpaceX rockets were recently grounded for a couple of weeks after an in-flight mishap—NASA astronauts won’t be able to go anywhere.

For weeks after Starliner’s launch, officials at both NASA and Boeing downplayed issues. Boeing, in particular, kept hyping the spacecraft even as engineers struggled to understand the root of the propulsion problems. “The vehicle has really performed extremely well,” Mark Nappi, the manager of Boeing’s commercial-spaceflight program, told reporters late last month. (Nappi was noticeably absent from yesterday’s press conference, a departure from the usual format.) The agency and the company have both bristled at growing public perception that Wilmore and Williams are stranded or stuck. I still think that stranded is an exaggeration, as I wrote last month. Stuck, however, is becoming painfully more accurate with each passing day.

The astronauts are making the best of the situation, as any other travelers waiting for their flight might. But space travel is far more dangerous than air travel, and it will be for decades to come. “Even the best designed, flight proven vehicles, under the best considerations, have analytical probability of failure that is eyewatering in comparison to everyday life,” Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and manager of the space-shuttle program, wrote in his blog this week. NASA has an extremely important decision to make now. Better stuck, for now, than sorry.

Climate Change Is Shifting the Planet’s Most Basic Properties

2024-08-06T11:55:47-04:00

Updated at 5:26 p.m. ET on August 7, 2024

Any planet, in our own solar system or beyond, is shaped by a certain set of influences: the whirlwind circumstances of its formation, the contents of its deep interiors, other natural phenomena that ebb and flow with time. These forces help determine the speed at which a world spins, the wobble of its axis, and the invisible boundary between it and the rest of the universe, the line where the final wisps of its atmosphere end and space begins.

Jupiter drew in the most primordial gas at its inception, so it spins faster than our solar system’s other planets. Mars’s wobble is influenced by the sloshing of its molten iron core. Our own planet is still wobbling from the effects of the last ice age.

In recent years, scientists have noticed that the effects of climate change—melting ice, rising sea levels, an atmosphere filled with heat-trapping gases—are affecting Earth’s fundamental properties. These changes might be imperceptible to us, but they are measured on a scale so enormous that they have altered the way our planet inhabits its place in the cosmos.

Consider Earth’s rotational speed, which gives us our 24-hour day. The planet has been slowing down for much of its history, lengthening the days ever so slightly, and scientists have long known that the loss of ice at Earth’s poles could contribute to this slowing. “The physics is very, very straightforward,” Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at UC San Diego, told me. When polar ice melts, the water moves toward the equator, bulking up the planet’s middle and changing the dynamics that keep the Earth going around.

Between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond has been added to each day in the 20th century, according to a recent study. But since 2000, the days have been lengthening at a much faster pace, Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the study’s co-authors, told me. In the paper, the team didn’t specify whether this recent slowdown is caused by greenhouse-gas emissions. But the accelerating loss of Arctic and Antarctic ice is humankind’s doing, and that extra water is flowing into the equatorial oceans. “We are messing with our climate system,” Adhikari said. If emissions continue to rise, in a worst-case scenario the rate that days lengthen per century could nearly double by 2100, the research suggests. In that scenario, climate change would overtake the primary force that has been slowing Earth down for billions of years: the moon’s pull on the planet’s tides.

The effects of climate change are even more apparent in studies of Earth’s axis, which can wander because of geological and atmospheric processes. For example, when Earth entered its post-glacial era and the frigid weight of all that ice melted into the oceans, the planet’s viscous mantle began to shift, and the crust rose like foam. The rebound has occurred unevenly, shifting the planet’s balance. In the early aughts, scientists registered a sudden change: After a century of wobbling toward roughly the same part of Canada, the axis began drifting eastward. Adhikari and other researchers have attributed most of that shift to the melting of polar ice sheets and the resulting sea-level rise. Once again, the movement of water from the poles to the equator is to blame. “It all boils down to the transport of mass from one part of the planet to another part of the planet,” Adhikari said. In fact, the very shape of the planet is changing, turning a flattened sphere into an even flatter sphere.

Climate change has even affected the way Earth interacts with space. Greenhouse gases trap heat more effectively in the thicker atmosphere closer to the ground, but higher up, where the atmosphere is much thinner, that excess heat escapes into space. When that air cools, it contracts, leaving the higher altitudes beyond even less dense than they already were, Ingrid Cnossen, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, told me. While the portion of the atmosphere closest to the ground is becoming hotter, the upper layers are cooling dramatically.

All of these planet-size tweaks, for now, have only small implications for the people living here. The shifting nature of Earth’s wobble must be accounted for to keep certain satellite technology working properly. The cooling upper atmosphere also means that space debris, left behind from our decades of exploration, experiences less atmospheric drag and remains in orbit longer, heightening existing worries about the disruptions that a significant crash could have on modern life. A slightly longer day matters most for those in charge of managing precise timekeeping for computer systems. The rest of Earth’s inhabitants will continue to feel the effects of climate change in much more tangible ways—such as terrifyingly intense hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, the deadly extreme heat hovering over India, and wildfires that firefighters in California struggle to contain for weeks.

But this is the first time in history that humanity has been able to witness itself, in real time, reshaping the most basic facts about our planet, which once seemed like they were beyond human influence. Agnew, who is a history buff in addition to a geophysicist, has found an early suggestion of melting ice slowing Earth down in a scientific paper from 1866. The author wrote about it as a pure hypothetical. Decades later, it is an alarming reality. Two centuries of burning fossil fuels has pressured Earth enough that the planet has had to adjust, responding to our actions as if we were the shifting of its mantle or the tug of the moon.

This article originally misstated that slightly longer days would impact the timekeeping of GPS systems.

We Might Get Thrilling News About Aliens … in 2040

2024-07-26T15:04:27-04:00

Yesterday, NASA announced that one of its Mars rovers had sampled a very, very intriguing rock. At first glance, the rock looks much like the rest of the red planet—rugged, sepia-toned, dry. But it’s arguably the most exciting one that robotic space explorers have ever come across. The rock, NASA said in a press release, “possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life.”

Of course it would happen like this. In the midst of a historically eventful summer—an attempted assassination of a former president, the abrupt campaign exit of a sitting one, possibly the worst IT failure in history—scientists might have an alien discovery on their hands.

To be clear, the rock, which scientists are calling Cheyava Falls, bears only potential evidence of fossilized life. There are other plausible explanations for its appearance and composition, mundane ones that have nothing to do with biological processes. Still, scientists are thrilled. “This is the exact type of rock that we came to Mars to find,” Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who led the selection of the mission’s destination, told me. But to really investigate whether Cheyava Falls contains marvelous, existential proof of another genesis in our very own solar system, NASA needs to bring the sample home—a prospect that might take more than 15 years.

[Read: We’ve never seen Mars quite like this]

According to NASA, the rover, called Perseverance, has detected in Cheyava Falls organic compounds, which are necessary for life as we know it. The rock bears dozens of leopard spots: tiny, irregularly shaped off-white splotches, ringed with black material that NASA scientists say contains iron and phosphate. Such features can arise from chemical reactions that could provide life-giving energy for microbes. If you encountered these leopard spots in an ancient rock formation on Earth, you would assume that some microscopic organisms once dwelled there.

The Cheyava Falls rock was found in a region of Mars’s Jezero Crater that many scientists believe flowed with water several billion years ago. Perhaps, before the planet froze over, there might have been enough time—and the right ingredients—for tiny life forms to emerge; if so, Jezero Crater could have been among the liveliest spots on the red planet. Cheyava Falls supports that theory because it is marked with streaks of calcium sulfate, which suggests that water once flowed through its sediments. Crucially, sulfate is good for preserving organic material, Horgan said.

Scientists inside and outside NASA know that the discovery comes with caveats. Carol Stoker, a NASA planetary scientist who is not involved in the mission, told me in an email that although “this is the most interesting rock that Perseverance has sampled,” she would like to see more evidence for the claim that the rover’s instruments detected organic materials. Entirely abiotic processes can produce organic compounds. And just because certain chemical components could serve as energy sources, that doesn’t mean that something once used them. “That’s like saying that a field of corn is evidence for the presence of cows,” Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College who has studied interactions between minerals and microbes, told me in an email.

[Read: Scientists are very worried about NASA’s Mars plan]

More evidence isn’t likely to come anytime soon. NASA says that the Perseverance has studied the Cheyava Falls rock “from just about every angle imaginable,” with every instrument it’s got. But the rover alone can’t tell scientists if the discovery signals a true breakthrough. “The only way to be sure is to get that sample into a lab on Earth,” Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me in an email.

The good news is that NASA has spent years working on an ambitious mission, called Mars Sample Return, to do just that. The bad news is that the mission is currently in limbo. NASA officials put development on pause earlier this year, saying that the program had become too expensive and was taking too long. The working timeline meant that the samples that Perseverance has been collecting wouldn’t return to Earth until 2040, and even before the Cheyava Falls discovery, NASA wanted them back sooner. The agency is now considering alternative mission concepts, including bringing home fewer samples than planned. That possibility has worried scientists, and they’re no doubt hoping that the tantalizing finding persuades NASA not to give up on the mission. If nothing else, the timing of this discovery is convenient for proponents of sample return, an extra point of data in favor of bringing as many samples home as soon as possible.

[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]

Scientists are used to ambiguity in this line of work. Back in September 2020, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists announced that they had found evidence of phosphine in the clouds of Venus—a gas that, on Earth, is associated with life. (Apparently there’s never a nice, quiet time to announce the discovery of maybe-aliens.) Almost four years later, scientists remain unsure about whether the phosphine is a product of living creatures, ordinary geological activity, or something else. To our knowledge, Venus remains lifeless.

Even if Cheyava Falls is brought to Earth, scientists might not come to any meaningful conclusions. They might not find anything because, as intriguing as Cheyava Falls looks now, Perseverance’s drill might have struck just to the left or the right of fossilized life, and none of it would have made it into the sample tube. Martian life might even be hidden in another part of the planet altogether, at its frigid poles or in underground caves. Or scientists could find nothing because they don’t know what to look for; their search is guided by the structure of life as we know it on Earth, and they may not recognize what our planetary neighbor has managed to create.

Short of the arrival of giant spaceships from an extraterrestrial civilization eager to bestow on us a new language, uncovering maybe-aliens in the form of teeny, long-dead microbes won’t change the course of most people’s daily lives. But the finding would still be a source of wonder, even comfort. It would mean that the history of life on Earth is just one story, perhaps one of countless others in the universe. A pale red dot, suspended in the same sunbeam as our blue one, with its own rich tale of movement and community. But until scientists can actually examine Cheyava Falls and other samples like it, we don’t have a hope of understanding how those stories might have begun.

NASA Should Ditch the Spin

2024-07-24T14:00:51-04:00

Before Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams took off for the International Space Station in early June, NASA removed some of their suitcases from their Boeing-made spacecraft. The ISS was in urgent need of a new pump for the system that recycles urine into water, so the personal items had to go. There’s no laundry on the ISS, but no matter. For their inaugural mission on Boeing’s Starliner, Butch and Suni, as the astronauts are known, were planning to stay on the space station for only about a week.

But one week turned into another, and then another, and then seven. Before Starliner launched, NASA had set a 45-day deadline for keeping the spacecraft in orbit for the sake of the capsule’s batteries, which hadn’t been tested in space yet. Today is day 48. According to NASA officials, the batteries are still performing well, and Starliner could remain docked to the space station as late as mid-August while the agency and its aerospace contractor troubleshoot issues with the spacecraft. SpaceX has been successfully shuttling astronauts to ISS for four years, and NASA badly wants a second option. But this historic mission—the first time Boeing has ever flown NASA astronauts—has turned into a debacle.

Officials at the agency and the aerospace company have insisted that Wilmore and Williams are not in any danger, but the public narrative—that the astronauts are stranded on the ISS—has not been flattering. Boeing has taken the brunt of the bad reviews, perhaps because public perception of the aerospace company is already suffering from well-publicized issues with its airplanes, including a door falling out mid-flight. But NASA, which hired Boeing to transport its astronauts, bears significant responsibility too: for its uneven supervision of Starliner’s development leading up to launch and its overly guarded communications to the public since, which have done more to fan rumors about the state of the mission than dispel them.

NASA itself has previously acknowledged that it could have handled the Starliner program better. In an uncrewed 2019 test flight, in which Starliner failed to reach the ISS, engineers had to hurriedly patch a flight-software glitch that would otherwise have caused the destruction of the spacecraft and—if any astronauts had been on board—the loss of human lives. A NASA official later said that its oversight of the program had been “insufficient.” NASA personnel have since worked more closely with Boeing employees, looking over the aerospace giant’s shoulder as it has addressed software errors, corroded valves, and parachute concerns. By May of this year, in the lead-up to the long-awaited crewed flight, a Boeing official said the Starliner team was operating at “peak performance.”

Then fresh problems appeared—a helium leak, a “design vulnerability” in the propulsion system—delaying the launch by a month. When Wilmore and Williams finally reached orbit, Starliner sprouted more helium leaks and some of its thrusters conked out, forcing the astronauts to delay their docking with the ISS. Nine days after the astronauts arrived, NASA announced the first of several postponements of their departure; the malfunctioning thrusters are on a part of Starliner that is discarded before reentry, and officials said they wanted to collect as much data as they can before it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. Eventually, NASA stopped setting new return dates altogether and began conducting tests of a Starliner thruster at a facility in New Mexico to better understand how the thrusters might perform during a return journey.

[Read: Boeing was this close to launching astronauts]

None of this, officials have said, means the astronauts are in dire straits. And to be fair, the “stranded” narrative is certainly exaggerated. (NASA maintains that it has no plans to retrieve Wilmore and Williams with SpaceX’s trusty Crew Dragon.) And yet the agency’s attempts to refute any stuck-ness narrative have been both ineffective and baffling. For weeks, officials have repeatedly claimed that, in an emergency, Starliner could whisk the astronauts away from the ISS and deliver them to the ground. But clearly a normal return is being held up, for reasons significant enough that NASA is willing to change certain mission parameters, as well as make time for running tests at home and reviewing the results.

Recently, I asked Steve Stich, the manager of NASA's commercial-crew program, whether Wilmore and Williams’s journey home is directly contingent on the testing, which involves engineers disassembling a thruster and inspecting every bit for flaws. Stich didn’t give a firm yes or no. Instead, he said that NASA wants to finish the testing first, to “make sure we’re not missing anything before we commit to undocking and landing.” NASA did not respond to a request for more information on Stich’s reply, and Boeing did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

That sort of obfuscation forces observers to read between the lines. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that NASA believes bringing the astronauts home before they’ve raked Starliner with a fine-tooth comb is simply too risky right now. “Of course they don’t feel comfortable putting them in the vehicle,” a retired NASA astronaut told me, speaking on condition of anonymity so that he could be candid. “Otherwise they would have put them in it already.”

[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]

Maybe officials worry that admitting outright that a return journey is currently too risky would fuel more sensationalist coverage. Or perhaps NASA leaders want to protect Boeing. After all, they plan to fly more crews on Starliner, and any hint of frustration from the space agency could erode public trust in its already troubled contractor.

NASA would fare better if it leaned into uncertainty instead of avoiding the very mention of it. To borrow the agency’s own mantra, Starliner’s first crewed flight is a test mission. Anomalies are to be expected, and NASA is well equipped to handle them. This is the agency that rescued the Apollo 13 crew with a roomful of engineers, cardboard, and duct tape. It’s no stranger to improvising solutions to unexpected problems. Even more important, NASA owes the public as much transparency as possible: It is a taxpayer-funded agency, and a few billion dollars of its budget have gone directly into the Starliner program. “It is discouraging that NASA appears more focused on shaping the story than on their mandate to provide unfettered information to taxpayers,” Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator and the author of the memoir Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age, told me.

Engineers completed the testing campaign in New Mexico last week, and a public update on Starliner is expected tomorrow. Meanwhile, on the ISS, Wilmore and Williams have slotted into the rhythm of living in space, contributing to scientific research and station maintenance. Their lives may depend on Starliner working properly, so no one can fault NASA for taking an extremely cautious approach. But few, I believe, would fault the space agency for being more direct about it.

The Search for Alien Life Starts on Earth

2024-07-17T07:00:00-04:00

Antarctica is home to some of the most alien places on Earth. No trees interrupt the horizon. The landscape, all sharp edges, seems to go on forever until it drops off dramatically into the frigid sea. Everything is quiet, save for the crackle of ice and gusts of wind, and unbearably cold.

John Priscu, a microbial ecologist at Montana State University, has visited Antarctica 40 times for research since the mid-1980s. When he first made the trip, scientists weren’t as worried about climate change as they are now. But these days, Priscu can feel the planet changing beneath his feet. The snow has become noticeably mushier, and driving equipment-laden tractors across the landscape feels like slogging through thick mud. Drills meant to probe icy depths instead get stuck in the slush.

For scientists like Priscu, the effects of a warming world reach far beyond our suffering planet. In Antarctica, the Arctic, and lower latitudes around the world, scientists use extreme environments to test ideas and techniques for ambitious space missions. Such places, known as analog sites, resemble environments on Mars and certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn—celestial bodies where microbial life may have once arisen, or may even be alive right now. Knowledge about the little organisms living in these strange places on Earth gets funneled into efforts to detect alien life elsewhere in the solar system.

If humans ever find evidence of extraterrestrial life, it will most likely be tiny and quiet, not a radio transmission from a distant civilization but perhaps a string of amino acids arranged in a familiar way in a chunk of ice. Humankind’s space-exploration talents are the sharpest and cleverest they’ve ever been; we have managed, from afar, to fly a helicopter in the Martian sky, sidle up to moons of Jupiter, and change the orbit of an asteroid. There’s never been a better time to find proof, once and for all, that life managed to spark somewhere other than on this planet. But climate change is melting away the rare places on Earth that could help astronomers make that historic discovery.

[Read: There’s hope for life on Europa, a distant moon]

Scientists did not seriously consider the possibility that life could survive on inhospitable alien worlds until they found ecosystems thriving without sunlight or significant oxygen right here on Earth. In the mid-20th century, they detected microbes within the rock of Antarctica’s dry valleys. In 1977, marine creatures were discovered around hydrothermal vents deep in the Pacific Ocean. Priscu has sampled several subglacial lakes in Antarctica, drilling through the ice to reach secret realms of life that have been swirling in peace for millions of years.

Similar communities may exist in oceans beneath the icy exteriors of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. Antarctic lakes provide necessary practice for missions to sample those oceans. But Antarctica is losing ice rapidly. If the glaciers that cover Priscu’s lakes vanish—an ever-likelier possibility in a warming world—the once-hidden water could freeze solid. “We need to get into these deep subglacial lakes in Antarctica while we still have them,” Priscu told me. “If we can’t develop the tools and the ability to drill through two miles of ice in Antarctica and sample an environment for life, we shouldn’t be spending billions of dollars putting a lander on Europa.”

Astronomers are intent on exploring Europa, in part because its surface is crisscrossed with reddish streaks that suggest the presence of sulfur, which is essential to life as we know it. In fact, Europa looks remarkably similar to Borup Fiord Pass, a site in the Canadian High Arctic where a natural spring spills out onto the ice, carrying sulfur from beneath a glacier. The spring is the only one of its kind on Earth, and NASA has relied on data gathered there to design a mission to Europa, scheduled to launch later this year. A century ago, Borup Fiord Pass likely had dozens of such sulfur springs, John Spear, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines who has conducted research at the site, told me. Now there’s just the one.

[Read: Scientists are very worried about NASA's Mars plan]

Scientists could re-create some alien conditions in the lab, but many of them would make for a poor substitute. The sulfur-loving bacteria at Borup Fiord Pass, for example, produce an unpredictable assortment of compounds that’s difficult to mimic artificially. “There are so many possibilities and random things that happen in microbiology and geochemistry,” Spear said. “We can’t duplicate that in a synthetic environment.”

In Greenland, melting has made researchers question whether they’re getting the best results. The ice sheet there is regarded as one of the best analog sites for Enceladus, Michael Malaska, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me. Enceladus sprays icy particles into space through cracks in its surface, and some of the material lands back on the moon’s surface and eventually stacks up. Malaska and his colleagues practice searching for life there by shooting lasers into the Greenland ice and looking for the telltale glow of amino acids in complex organic molecules. It’s a proof of concept for similar instruments on a potential mission to Enceladus. Surface temperatures on that moon are astoundingly cold—about –330 degrees Fahrenheit—so Malaska needs his analog sites to be as chilly as possible. Warmer conditions can reorganize any organic material in the snow, hindering Malaska’s efforts to interpret his results.

Even in warmer environments, fading ice has been a blow to astrobiologists. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, laments the loss of analog sites in volcanic caves in Hawaii. As on Earth, flowing lava on Mars carved out empty underground caverns. Steam from volcanic eruptions could eventually have settled there and accumulated into ice as conditions grew colder. Some scientists think that Martian life may have migrated to these caves after the red planet's oceans evaporated into space. Lee describes Earthly look-alikes of these spots as the “holy grail” in the search for life on Mars. Lee said that a few remain in Iceland, but in Hawaii, the air that flows into the analog caves from the surface is now so warm that nearly all of them are ice-free.

[Read: The search for alien life begins in Earth's oldest desert]

Lee has faced different challenges at his field sites in the Arctic. About 15 years ago, he and his team drove across the sea ice of the Northwest Passage in winter, sampling the snow as they went to study how human-designed missions might contaminate promising sites in space. Their truck almost went through the ice then, and the landscape is now so slushy that Lee says he wouldn’t try to repeat the expedition, even in the heart of winter. “Climate change has essentially rendered this kind of study really dangerous,” he told me. In Canada’s British Columbia, longer and more intense fire seasons have created problems for Darlene Lim, a research scientist at NASA. Even a distant wildfire can affect air quality enough to prevent Lim from bringing her teams to Pavilion Lake, home to a microbial community thought to resemble some of Earth’s earliest life-forms. “Every time I have the privilege of going into one of these environments, I have to do a bang-up job,” Lim told me. “I have to make sure that I optimize my trip to get all the data I could possibly get,” because she doesn't know if smoke or other hazards could someday keep her from coming back.

Analog sites don’t only inform mission designs and the interpretation of data from space. They also expand scientists’ imagination for what kinds of extraterrestrial life are possible. In 2017, researchers dropped a camera-carrying robot into a hole in a floating glacier in the Arctic and discovered a community of corals, worms, anemones, and other creatures, a metropolis hidden beneath the frozen landscape. Microbial ecologists hadn’t seen anything quite like it before.

A few years later, nearly half of the ice sheet collapsed into the ocean, dragging the habitat away with it. How many more hidden worlds might be lost to our metamorphosing climate before we get the chance to understand them? The faster that extreme ecosystems disappear from our planet, the more limited astronomers’ concept of life may be, raising the risk that we overlook a faraway spark somewhere else. No amount of sophisticated scientific instruments can make up for that.

Hurricane Beryl Is a Terrifying Omen

2024-07-02T16:15:38-04:00

Hurricane Beryl is an unprecedented storm. It’s been at least 173 years since certain parts of the Caribbean have experienced a storm this brutal. Over just a few days, Beryl has ripped through the region, leaving devastation on the islands in its path. The doors and roofs have been torn off homes. Trees have been snapped in half and branches thrown into the street. Cows have been killed in the fields where they grazed. At least six people have died in the storm, and officials expect the number to rise. According to the prime minister of Grenada, the Category 4 hurricane "flattened" the island of Carriacou, where it made landfall yesterday, in just half an hour. And that was all before Beryl leveled up to Category 5 last night, reaching wind speeds of 165 miles an hour.

Beryl transformed from a tropical depression to a Category 4 hurricane in two days, faster than any hurricane has ever done before the month of September, Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami, told me. It is the easternmost hurricane to emerge in the tropical Atlantic Ocean in the month of June. It’s the first storm to strengthen to Category 4 in the Atlantic in June, and now the earliest on record to hit Category 5. Hurricane Beryl “is not normal, in any way, shape, or form,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Tallahassee, Florida, who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me.

We’re only a month into the Atlantic hurricane season, and already, the boundaries that normally govern it are breaking. The cause is abnormally hot ocean waters—warmed by El Niño last year, but also by centuries of burning fossil fuels. Climate change “does not make a storm like Hurricane Beryl exist, but it certainly helped,” McNoldy said. Monster hurricanes like Beryl shouldn't happen this early. They shouldn't arise in this particular part of the Atlantic basin. And they shouldn't be intensifying at such astonishing rates, before the season has even gotten into full swing. But they are, and will probably continue to do so as long as our oceans continue to simmer.

[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]

Experts have been warning of unusual events like Beryl for weeks now. Global sea-surface temperatures have been historically high for more than a year, and warm water provides plenty of moist air that fuels storms as they move along. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an extraordinary season of eight to 13 hurricanes, compared with the usual seven. Between four and seven of those could count as major, between Category 3 and 5. A typical season sees only three.

Beryl’s dramatic arrival echoes some of the nastiest moments in Atlantic hurricane history. The previous record for easternmost tropical Atlantic hurricane was set in 1933, which saw six major hurricanes. The season in which a Category 5 storm took shape earliest was 2005, the year of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. “Those two years are not years you want to be breaking records of,” McNoldy said. “Those are the two most scary, active hurricane seasons that have ever been observed.” According to the Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach, as of this afternoon, Beryl has generated more energy than 1983’s entire, quiet season.

All of this is particularly startling when you consider that Beryl is only the first hurricane of the season, which usually peaks in mid-September. Right now, the Caribbean Sea is as hot as it typically is in late August and September—how much warmer will it be in two months? Plus, forecasters’ dire predictions for this hurricane season are heavily influenced by La Niña, El Niño’s cooler opposite, which also allows hurricanes to become stronger than they otherwise would. But La Niña isn’t even here yet. It’s expected to arrive later this summer. “I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t expect more high-end events to happen this year,” McNoldy said. The strongest, most destructive storms are still yet to come.

[Read: ‘La Niña really can’t come soon enough’]

Experts had anticipated a storm as extreme as Beryl, but they’re still awed when faced with the real thing. “Everybody in tropical meteorology is just shocked by this,” Truchelut said. And if ocean warming continues apace, more people may soon find themselves similarly shocked. Beryl is a horrifying reminder that, in a warmer world, more people live in the path of potentially catastrophic storms.

Beryl is now traveling across open water toward the central Caribbean. It’s predicted to weaken today while bringing still-dangerous winds and storm surge to Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and southwestern Haiti. Then it will likely make landfall again along Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula later this week. By the time it is forecast to reach Texas’s Gulf Coast over the weekend, it should be a rainy tropical storm—a relatively minor threat for a region that is used to major hurricanes, if not ones that come so early.

In this hurricane season, and those to come, even people who live in regions that experience storms every year will need to recalibrate their approach. A grizzled Texan or Floridian might say they haven’t had to evacuate in decades. But hurricanes are fundamentally changing. Americans seem to have escaped this nightmare storm, but “we might not be so lucky next time,” Truchelut said. “The next one might be pointed at the southeastern United States.”

We Ruined Rain

2024-06-20T15:32:25-04:00

Water gave every living thing on Earth the gift of existence. And yet, of late, it seems determined to wipe us out. The Atlantic hurricane season, widely predicted to be a fierce one, is here, and early this morning the first named storm, Alberto, made landfall in northeastern Mexico and drenched everything in its path.

And in Florida last week, it was as if the heavens had turned on the tap and simply left it running. The state’s south usually gets about eight to 10 inches of rain throughout June; some parts of Southern Florida received about 20 inches of rain in just 24 hours, turning streets impassable, damaging homes, and enveloping cars.

This type of rainfall has become more frequent and intense in recent decades. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and plenty is available as warmer temperatures at the Earth’s surface allow more water to evaporate. In a hotter world, when it rains, it really pours. Experts call torrents such as those in Florida 100-year storms, even 1,000-year storms. And yet, they’ve been occurring with alarming frequency across the United States and in other parts of the world.

Extreme precipitation is a sign of how fundamentally humans have managed to alter the workings of our planet. The first rains on Earth fell several billion years ago, covering the once-molten surface with seas where life eventually emerged. Even now, as scientists search for signs of habitable worlds beyond Earth, they follow the water because they understand that it turned this little ball of rock into a paradise for life. But by burning fossil fuels for about 250 years—no time at all, on the scale of our planet’s history—humans have turned a cosmic wonder into a weapon.

[Read: Playing God with the atmosphere]

Climate change has disrupted the water cycle, speeding up every phase in the ancient, endless process that circulates H2O among the oceans, atmosphere, and land. Global sea levels have risen about 0.15 inches each year over the past decade, more than double the annual increase recorded in the 20th century, both because the ice at Earth’s poles is melting (even faster than predicted) and because water expands when it warms. The excess threatens to inundate coastal communities, especially during rainstorms, and eat away at their shores; one inch of sea-level rise leads to the loss of 8.5 feet of coastline.

Meanwhile, hurricanes, fueled by hot oceans, are becoming wetter. Even non-hurricane storms, combined with rising seas, are turning dangerous and straining infrastructure. The storm in Florida overwhelmed Miami’s already struggling canal network, where “less rain, or rain that fell at a gentler rate, would have drained away easily,” Mario Alejandro Ariza wrote in The Atlantic earlier this week.

The heavy rain in Mexico is, in some ways, a blessing—the area has recently been parched. Droughts are growing in severity around the world, but even when they’re broken by rainstorms, the relief comes with its own dangers. Over the past couple of winters, record-breaking rains have rescued California from a prolonged drought, but they have also produced deadly floods.

If you zoom out over the storm clouds to consider Earth as it truly is—a planet orbiting one of countless stars, a tiny blue dot in an endless universe—the way we’re treating our precious water starts to look like a cosmic disgrace. Astronomical observations have turned up evidence of rain on other worlds, but the droplets are made of methane, iron, quartz, and even sand, not the H2O that helped create and nourish life as we know it.

[Read: We’re gambling with the only good oceans in the universe]

When astronomers look for the signature of water farther afield, in the atmospheres of planets around other suns, they’re imagining the possibility not just of microbial life—the types of aliens that we’re looking for in our own solar system—but of intelligent beings, members of an advanced civilization that has amassed stories and records of its own water cycle. After all, “rain is not only part of our chaotic atmosphere, but part of our chaotic selves—connected in every holy book from the Bible to the Rig Veda, every human genre from cuneiform script to Chopin,” the journalist Cynthia Barnett wrote in Rain: A Natural and Cultural History in 2015. If water gave rise to all that here, why couldn’t the same be true on another planet?

The thought of such a discovery is what makes the detection of water vapor on some far-off exoplanet so exciting, especially when that world orbits within its star’s habitable zone, as Earth does. But the presence of some water isn’t itself a guarantee of life. The sheer amount of water on our planet is, as far as astronomers can tell, a remarkably lucky exception. The other rocky planets in our neighborhood, Venus and Mars, had their own water cycles, with oceans and rain, before they boiled and froze, respectively. But Earth has managed to hold on to its water, the gift that started it all.

For Michael Rawlins, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who studies the water cycle, the increase in historic deluges feel almost karmic. “Societies around the globe have developed because of the use of fossil fuels,” Rawlins told me; tapping that ancient reservoir became its own problem as the resulting carbon emissions warmed the planet. Water, even more crucially, made life here possible, and yet now, because of climate change, that too “is almost coming back to bite us.” But fossil fuels were not a precondition to our existence. Water is, and we’re acting as if maintaining its balance is not a paramount condition of our future. In the past, we attributed such devastating rains and floods to divine powers, the work of unseen, raging gods. But in this age, we have to face the reality that we’re the ones who have turned a cosmic abundance into a cataclysm.

One Satellite Crash Could Upend Modern Life

2024-06-14T11:41:37-04:00

Updated at 5:03 p.m. ET on June 14, 2024

Earlier this year, two satellites from two adversarial countries nearly collided while orbiting Earth at thousands of miles an hour. The first, an American spacecraft on a NASA mission to study the planet’s upper atmosphere, wasn’t built to maneuver in orbit. The second, a Russian surveillance spacecraft, was defunct, and thus uncontrollable. The only thing people on Earth could do was watch. Darren McKnight, a space-debris expert, stayed up all night on February 28, monitoring the trajectories of the satellites, which, combined, weighed several thousand pounds. “I felt very, very helpless,” McKnight told me.

According to LeoLabs, the U.S. space-tracking firm where McKnight works, the probability of collision that night was somewhere between 3 and 8 percent. That may not seem so terrible, but risk works a bit differently in the realm above Earth. Satellite trackers like McKnight start sounding the alarm when the probability of a crash reaches 0.001 percent; no one wants to see whole-number or, God forbid, double-digit percentages. In the end, the research spacecraft and the spy satellite ended up passing within just 33 feet of each other. At a recent conference, Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator, said the near miss was “very shocking” and “really scared us.”

A collision between the two satellites would have unleashed thousands of debris fragments into low Earth orbit, an already congested region of space where close passes are becoming more common. Numerous debris-generating events, as experts call them, have transpired over the past several decades. So far we’ve avoided a significant disaster through a combination of maneuvering and luck, but government agencies and companies have begun to recognize that the status quo is unsustainable, and to invest in efforts to manage the messiness.

The threat of a disastrous event is always lurking in low Earth orbit, frustratingly unpredictable but worryingly persistent. It’s not unlike the major earthquake that is expected to rock California in the coming decades. In the orbital landscape, the “Big One” could come in the form of any number of scenarios: collisions between satellites, the intentional shooting-down of a spacecraft, a nuclear event. But the outcome of such a seismic event in orbit is the same. A tremendous burst of fast-moving shards, indiscriminate in their destruction, will whiz through Earth’s jam-packed coating of satellites, threatening to tip the world below into a new reality.

A “Big One” in space would be a strangely quiet event. We would not see the swaying of the infrastructure that makes so much of our modern life possible; instead disaster would manifest right in the palms of our hands as our smartphones suddenly struggled to work. Satellite technology provides communications, GPS, and even an accounting of time to people, businesses, and governments around the world. If it fails, power grids, agricultural functions, shipping routes, and banking transactions could quickly falter too. New missions to restore technological normalcy would launch into a more perilous environment, one that may be too dangerous for astronauts to traverse. In the worst-case scenario, a hypothetical phenomenon called Kessler syndrome, space could become so overpopulated that collisions lead to a cascade of even more collisions, rendering low Earth orbit nearly impossible to navigate.

The fact that we’ve managed to fill space—space!—with so much junk can be hard to fathom. Space is, after all, enormous. But “it’s getting smaller every day,” John Crassidis, a mechanical- and aerospace-engineering professor at the University at Buffalo, told me. Satellites deployed today join broken ones that launched decades ago. Low Earth orbit, which tops out at about 1,200 miles above the ground, is also littered with discarded rocket hardware, which can generate more shards when their propellant tanks or batteries explode. Some dead satellites and pieces of debris eventually fall out of orbit, tugged downward by atmospheric drag, but others are likely to stick around for centuries.

[From the October 2019 issue: Space is getting too crowded]

The U.S. military is aware of more than 25,000 objects in low Earth orbit that are larger than a doughnut; the tiniest fragments, estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, are too small to track. The International Space Station dodges potentially hazardous pieces of metal about once a year, adjusting its orbit slightly to avoid, say, a Japanese rocket part or the debris from a Chinese anti-satellite test. Higher altitudes are less crowded, but they lack the atmospheric drag that would help dispose of newly created shards. And the amount of junk there is only growing.

McKnight is particularly worried about what he calls “bad neighborhoods.” One is a cluster of rocket bodies, each the size of a school bus and weighing roughly 20,000 pounds, that have been flying past one another since the early 1990s. The probability of a collision there in the next five years is about 6 percent, and what a crash it would be: “If two of those were to collide, it would create on the order of 15,000 to 20,000 trackable fragments that would be lethal if they hit any other satellites,” McKnight said. The current record holder, a ballistic-missile test that China conducted against one of its own weather satellites in 2007, produced only about 3,600 trackable shards.

Another cluster, made up of much smaller Soviet-era hardware, has a 24 percent chance of experiencing a collision by 2029. These objects are much smaller, so a crash would create only about 5,000 fragments, McKnight said. But a debris-generating event doesn’t need to involve massive objects to create havoc. In 2021, a Russian weapons test that created just 1,500 pieces of debris still forced the residents of the International Space Station to shelter in place. A tiny piece of fast-moving debris can chip a window on the ISS. A sizable fragment could tear through the station.

[Read: Maybe don’t blow up satellites in space]

The growing concerns over orbital debris have sprouted a new crop of space companies focused on its removal. Astroscale, a Japanese company, has already conducted an in-orbit demonstration, sidling up to spacecraft targeted for disposal. But debris-removing technology may prove too expensive to scale; even the tiniest maneuvers require significant amounts of fuel.

A deep clean isn’t the solution, anyway. “We cannot collect all the pieces and bring them back down,” Carolin Frueh, an aerospace-engineering professor at Purdue University, told me. Instead, the world needs to agree on how much more mess to make. In the U.S., a new rule will soon require satellite operators to safely dispose of their spacecraft no more than five years after the end of their mission. (Last year, a Colorado-based TV provider was fined $150,000 for failing to properly deorbit an aging satellite—a very small penalty, but historic nonetheless.) Another rule meant to curtail the growth of abandoned rocket hardware is on the table.

Older space powers such as the U.S. may be ready to reckon with the dangers of stranded rocket hardware, but China, coming into its own as a superpower, has left more rocket parts in orbit in the past 20 years than the rest of the world combined, McKnight said. And it doesn’t seem likely to change course anytime soon. Much news is made out of SpaceX’s thousands of internet satellites, but the company has proved itself to be a fairly responsible driver, McKnight said, conducting thousands of maneuvers to swerve out of the way of other spacecraft and debris. By contrast, the Chinese government, which has ambitious “megaconstellation” plans, is “absolutely ignoring best practices for space-traffic coordination,” he said.

[Read: The night sky will never be the same]

Countries such as Russia, China, and India have not supported recent UN measures to halt anti-satellite demonstrations or forbid nuclear weapons in orbit. The latter could conjure hundreds of thousands of debris pieces, and might lead to “a mass extinction event for satellites,” Jessica West, a senior researcher at Project Ploughshares, a Canadian nuclear-disarmament institute, told me.

Recently, space powers and companies have begun to borrow language from another slow-moving crisis: climate change. SpaceX and other satellite operators say they’re committed to “space sustainability”; dozens of governments recently signed an agreement to become “debris neutral” by 2030. And managing space debris, like managing climate change, might require people to adapt in significant ways. We can live without space tourism and smartphones, if it comes to that. But such a change would indicate a civilizational shift, a turn inward that humans might not have imagined when we first set out into space. In the 20th century, the mark of our triumph as a spacefaring species was the constant stream of human inventions sailing beyond the atmosphere. In this century, that triumph will consist of figuring out how to avoid trapping ourselves on the ground.

Due to an editing error, this article originally misstated the speed of objects in low Earth orbit. Additionally, the article has been updated to clarify the statement that Russia, China, and India have not supported UN measures to halt anti-satellite demonstrations or forbid nuclear weapons in orbit.

NASA Finally Has an Alternative to SpaceX

2024-06-05T11:25:15-04:00

A Boeing spacecraft launched from the coast of Florida into orbit this morning, taking off in the kind of picture-perfect weather that every rocket hopes for in Cape Canaveral. Two veteran NASA astronauts are now on their way to the International Space Station. This particular commute to the space station is a major moment in American space travel. Barry Wilmore, the mission commander, and Sunita Williams, the pilot, are test-driving the new vehicle, known as Starliner. It’s the first time Boeing has launched astronauts into space, and the first time a woman has flown a trial of a new orbital spacecraft.

Every astronaut vehicle that has blasted off from U.S. soil since the beginning of the Space Age has experienced a nail-biting maiden voyage. It is a relief every time a crew safely reaches orbit, especially on a test flight. But the initial success of this mission is particularly comforting because the astronauts are flying on Boeing’s creation, whose debut was delayed by a series of issues. On this first crewed launch, Boeing has proved that it is not a disaster. But its triumph will lead only to more nail-biters. To show that it is reliable, Starliner will have to bring the astronauts home a little over a week from now, and then repeat the whole endeavor.

The troubles of Boeing, the airplane manufacturer, have not reflected kindly on Boeing, the builder of spacecraft. Over the past couple of months, NASA has fielded questions from reporters about whether the mountain of safety issues at the company’s airline division has spilled over into the space department. Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, has told reporters that Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun has previously assured him about the quality of the leadership at Boeing’s space division. (At the end of this year, Calhoun will become the second Boeing chief to step down in five years because of the turmoil.)

Boeing has a long history as a space contractor—it worked on Apollo rockets, the space station, and many projects in between. It’s also the primary contractor for NASA’s newest rocket, the Space Launch System, which is scheduled to launch astronauts toward the moon later this decade. With Starliner, Boeing is attempting to prove that it can deliver the nation’s astronauts to the space station and back by itself—and keep up with SpaceX, which has been doing the job since 2020. The effort has had its own share of technical problems and oversights, including in the past few weeks.

When NASA retired its fleet of space shuttles, in 2011, the space agency turned to the private sector for transporting people to and from the International Space Station, and soon after gave Boeing and SpaceX billion-dollar contracts to develop their own crewed systems. When the companies weren’t carrying government workers, they could sell seats to private citizens, a service that SpaceX has completed several times. SpaceX beat Boeing to the launchpad for an uncrewed test flight of its Dragon capsule, in 2019, which was mostly smooth from start to finish. But when Boeing followed later that year, the attempt had to be cut short. Starliner’s flight software malfunctioned soon after launch, and on the way down, engineers found and quickly patched a software glitch that would have resulted in complete failure of the mission—and, if any astronauts had been on board, the loss of lives.

After spending a year and a half wringing out software bugs, Boeing prepared in 2021 for a second attempt, only to discover more than a dozen corroded valves on the spacecraft as it sat waiting on top of the rocket. In 2022, Starliner finally made it to the International Space Station and back, but before Boeing could attempt a crewed flight, it had to address newly found problems with Starliner’s parachute system, as well as tape within the spacecraft that testing revealed to be flammable. Boeing finally felt ready enough to bring astronauts on board early last month, but the launch attempt was canceled hours before liftoff because of a faulty valve on the rocket. (The rocket, from the manufacturer United Launch Alliance, is used frequently, but it had never flown astronauts before today.) Over the next several weeks, engineers encountered more problems with Starliner itself, but by Saturday, NASA and Boeing felt ready to try again. “All is going well,” Mark Nappi, the manager of Boeing’s commercial-spaceflight program, said at a prelaunch press conference last week. But Starliner was grounded once again: an issue with a launchpad computer this time, one that turned up less than four minutes before the scheduled liftoff, when the astronauts and everyone watching likely believed that they were finally going.

Like the officials, the astronauts now flying on Starliner have stressed that the crewed mission may experience some problems. “Flying and operating in space is hard. It’s really hard, and we’re going to find some stuff,” Wilmore told reporters in March. Officials said the same about SpaceX’s first few crewed Dragon missions, but SpaceX’s launches weren’t preceded by quite so much bad press or quite so many glitches.

Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to arrive at the space station tomorrow. Along the way, the astronauts will briefly take control of the Boeing craft and see how it handles. Then Starliner must dock with the space station and later endure a fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere to touch down in the western United States, ideally at the primary landing site in the New Mexico desert. Starliner must pass each of these tests before NASA certifies the vehicle for regular flights, with more than two astronauts at a time, to the space station.

SpaceX underwent the same process in 2020 with its own inaugural crewed flight. By now NASA astronauts have flown on SpaceX often enough that it’s hardly a blip on space watchers’ radar. But the first few crewed flights on Dragon were all nerve-racking. The same will be true for Boeing’s Starliner. Boeing, in other words, is about to be tested publicly again and again. The writer Jerry Useem recently observed in The Atlantic that Boeing’s decisions in commercial air travel have in recent years turned “the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits.” Another truncated space mission would certainly ding Boeing, and a major failure could turn a company that helped define the Space Age into an emblem of constant calamity.

Boeing Was This Close to Launching Astronauts

2024-05-31T12:34:49-04:00

Updated at 3:33 p.m. on June 1, 2024

This afternoon, a Boeing-built spacecraft was set to blast off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral and head toward the International Space Station carrying a human crew for the first time. The rocket stood tall on the launchpad, with the spacecraft, Starliner, perched on top. Two NASA astronauts were suited up and strapped inside. The weather forecast was as perfect as launch weather gets. But with just four minutes to go before liftoff, automated systems stopped the countdown.

The astronauts are fine, and officials are now troubleshooting a computer that handles the rocket’s final prelaunch sequence, which didn’t work as intended But the pause caused Starliner to miss its scheduled liftoff window of only a single minute, timed to put the spacecraft on the proper trajectory to the space station.

Boeing’s first crewed launch was originally supposed to happen three weeks ago. The astronauts donned new Boeing-blue spacesuits, said goodbye to their loved ones, and strapped into a capsule atop a rocket humming with fuel. Then a valve on the rocket malfunctioned, and the launch was called off and rescheduled. Then engineers discovered a small helium leak within Starliner itself. While analyzing the leak, engineers stumbled upon a “design vulnerability” in the spacecraft’s propulsion system, further delaying the test flight. By today, it felt surreal to imagine that this spacecraft might actually get off the ground—not only because of the recent trouble, but because these problems are just the latest in a string of issues.

Boeing could try again tomorrow, but today’s last-minute cancellation is one more bump in a rocky, years-long journey. The company’s record matters because astronauts are precious cargo. But the company’s record also matters because every Boeing misstep leaves the United States ever more reliant on its rival company, SpaceX, and its CEO, Elon Musk, to transport its astronaut to space. Boeing doesn’t need to be the most groundbreaking or exciting American aerospace company to fulfill its duty to NASA. It merely needs to be a reliable transportation provider for America’s astronaut corps. And with this flight, it must prove that Starliner can simply work.

In 2011, after three decades of service, 135 missions, and two deadly disasters, America’s venerated fleet of space shuttles went into permanent retirement. But the country still needed a way to send its astronauts to the International Space Station, which demands constant staffing. So NASA turned to the private sector for help. It hired two companies—one young and inventive, the other established and staid—to develop new rides for its commuting spacefarers. SpaceX brought its first duo of astronauts to the ISS in the spring of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic. Since then, SpaceX has been consistently transporting four-person crews to the station, inside the company’s Dragon spacecraft and on its Falcon 9 rocket.

[Read: SpaceX’s riskiest business]

And Boeing … Well, last year, NASA’s second-in-command, Pam Melroy, told The Washington Post that Boeing’s inability to cross over into operational Starliner flights was "existential." In addition to the most recent round of software glitches and faulty hardware, Starliner has suffered repeated complications that have set it several years behind schedule. Boeing and SpaceX started out at roughly the same pace, both launching their respective new astronaut capsule to the ISS for the first time in 2019. But whereas SpaceX’s test went off without a hitch, Boeing’s was cut short. I still remember the eerie silence that settled over the press site at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, when officials realized that Starliner’s flight software had malfunctioned, and the spacecraft couldn’t reach the space station. Then, as Starliner made its way home, engineers discovered and fixed a software error that, if left uncorrected, could have resulted in a catastrophic failure.

Boeing didn’t complete a successful uncrewed mission until 2022, and has spent the past two years fixing still more issues. Every new space vehicle turns up problems for manufacturers to troubleshoot and iron out, and delays are common in the industry. But Boeing’s struggles have only compounded in recent weeks, when engineers made concerning discoveries about Starliner after NASA and Boeing officials had determined that the spacecraft was finally ready to fly.

Technicians have since replaced the wonky valve on the rocket, a frequently used vehicle from the manufacturer United Launch Alliance. Officials have decided not to plug the helium leak, determining that it doesn’t pose a safety hazard. An analysis of the propulsion system’s design vulnerability on Starliner determined that it could prevent the spacecraft from carrying out the maneuvers necessary to return to Earth, but only under rare circumstances. Engineers have prepared contingency plans for this mission, and Boeing officials said they have a few ideas for a permanent fix for the design issue, but they’ll apply them to later Starliner flights. For now, the teams have decided the spacecraft is fine to launch as is.

At a press conference last week, Mark Nappi, the manager of Boeing’s commercial-spaceflight program, said that although his team had missed the design weakness, he wasn’t concerned about Boeing’s process for determining flight readiness. "Hardware issues or hardware failures are just part of our business," Nappi said. "They are going to occur as we do launch preps; they’re going to occur in flight." Uncovering anomalies is indeed a natural part of the spaceflight industry. But such reasoning might not sound reassuring to the public. (Earlier today, a Boeing spokesperson told me that the company has no additional comment on the latest issues and pointed to Nappi’s recent remarks.)

All of this drama is unfolding while Boeing is under intense scrutiny for other recent events: this year’s infamous panel-blowing-off-the-plane-mid-flight incident and two fatal crashes several years before that. The company’s air and space divisions are two separate entities, and air travel and spaceflight are, of course, enormously different experiences. Starliner staff has NASA personnel watching over their shoulders, especially after the space agency admitted in 2020 that its oversight had previously been "insufficient." But the departments are part of the same embattled company, which faces multiple government investigations and the loss of its CEO amid the ongoing safety crisis. With every delay and bad surprise, the space part of Boeing will have a harder time convincing the government and the public that it’s the more capable, responsible sibling.

[Jerry Useem: Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing]

Boeing is supposed to make six regular-service flights for NASA in the coming years. In so doing, it would help fulfill the agency’s desire to have more than one form of astronaut transportation in operation. NASA leaders have touted competition among contractors as a way to make spaceflight cheaper, but they also have more pressing motivators than cost. If SpaceX, the agency’s current sole provider, has to suddenly ground its spaceships, NASA would have to consider turning to Russia for rides again. This arrangement brought NASA through the post-shuttle years from 2011 to 2020, but some members of Congress have always resented the arrangement.

Now NASA has once again deemed Boeing ready to attempt a crewed Starliner flight, and is projecting a fairly calm attitude about Starliner’s latest round of problems. When asked whether NASA was concerned that the issues hadn’t been found sooner, leaders emphasized that the inaugural crewed mission is a test flight. In fact, all of the 135 flights the space shuttles made could be considered test flights, "because we learned something on every single one of those flights," Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, said at the press conference last week. More than half a century in, spaceflight remains a dangerous production. By informally labeling every mission a test flight, NASA risks diminishing the importance of accountability for problems that arise, especially in the aftermath of a harrowing or even deadly event.

The launch, if it happens, will mark only the beginning of Boeing’s high-stakes demonstration. Starliner must deliver the astronauts assigned to it—the former military pilots Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams—to the space station, protect them during a fiery atmospheric reentry, and land them in the New Mexico desert. In a recent post about Wilmore and Williams on X, Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who flew on two shuttle missions, wrote, “We’ve never been totally ready for launch—just need to convince ourselves we’re ready enough.” Perhaps only someone who has flown to space can say the quiet part out loud.

‘La Niña Really Can’t Come Soon Enough’

2024-05-29T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 3:40 p.m. ET on May 29, 2024

There are still a few days left, but this month is on track to be the warmest May ever documented. In fact, every month since last June has broken worldwide temperature records. The world’s oceans, which were too hot last year, are still mostly too hot now. The combination of manmade global warming, an unnatural climate phenomenon, and El Niño, a natural one, has inflated temperatures around the globe over the past year; the current El Niño event, which emerged in the middle of 2023, has been among the strongest on record. This El Niño, at least, is nearly done—but its end likely won’t save the Northern Hemisphere from another sweltering summer.

El Niño episodes last only about nine to 12 months at a time, and forecasters predict that its cooler opposite, La Niña, will settle in sometime between this summer and early fall. La Niña should eventually lower the planetary thermostat, Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies the twin phenomena, told me. But a worrying amount of climate chaos still awaits us as La Niña asserts itself in the next several months, and the relief it may bring will be only temporary in the grand scheme of our warming world.

The transition to La Niña is not a flipped switch; the excess heat of El Niño conditions takes time to dissipate. As a result, “there’s a high likelihood that 2024 will be even warmer than 2023 because of this delayed effect,” McPhaden said. “La Niña may bring some relief, if not this year, then perhaps in 2025.”

For many people, though, 2025 is too far away. Right now, Southeast Asia is suffering from extreme heat. Europe is set to experience another brutally hot summer. In parts of the United States, heat-related health emergencies reached historic levels last summer, and we may experience a repeat this year. Some parts of Florida have already registered heat indexes—the “what it actually feels like” measure, combining air temperatures and relative humidity—well above the danger threshold this year, and it’s still spring.

[Read: We’re gambling with the only good oceans in the universe]

The extreme heat in Florida isn’t limited to land. Along its coasts, a marine heat wave caused massive coral bleaching last year, and marine scientists are not hopeful about this year either. Historically, such events were limited to August. But “last year, it all started in early July, and now this year, we’re seeing temperatures hit August levels in the middle of May,” Derek Manzello, a coral biologist and the coordinator of NOAA Coral Reef Watch, told me. “La Niña really can’t come soon enough,” he said, because “it should basically stop the bleeding.”

But for Florida especially, the transition to La Niña is its own kind of danger. During La Niña, high-altitude winds that might tear apart hurricanes in El Niño years weaken instead. So more storms spin into existence and strengthen on their way to land. To make matters worse, hurricanes intensify by feeding off warm seawater—and plenty of that is available in the Atlantic right now. The combination of La Niña and abnormally hot oceans is expected to produce a perilously strong hurricane season for the Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean.

Both El Niño and La Niña deliver grief to some regions of the world—heavy rains, intense storms, droughts, wildfires—and a reprieve to others. In Canada, “we want to move from El Niño to La Niña,” Hossein Bonakdari, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in the effects of climate change on civil-engineering infrastructure, told me. That’s because Canada experienced a staggeringly destructive wildfire season last year, and La Niña likely will bring much-needed rainfall that can reduce the risk of blazes. Meanwhile, “California loves El Niño because that rescued us last year from the drought,” Alexa Fredston, a quantitative ecologist at UC Santa Cruz, told me.

[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]

And human-caused climate change is amplifying the effects of both phenomena. “In a warmer world, the atmosphere can hold more moisture,” McPhaden said, so El Niño– or La Niña–caused rainfall that might once have been severe instead becomes extreme. A warmer atmosphere also increases the rate of evaporation of water on land, so severe droughts turn into extreme droughts, too.

Climate change also risks dampening the relief that La Niña has historically brought to regions warmed by El Niño. Manzello worries that La Niña won’t be enough to keep corals from bleaching this time, even moving into next year. “How much help is it really going to bring now that the global ocean is just so darn hot?” he said. Historically, La Niña’s cooler temperatures have curbed the formation of harmful algal blooms, which can be toxic to people, animals, and aquatic ecosystems, Julian Merder, a postdoctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told me. But what happens if global warming nudges temperatures into algae’s preferred zone even during the cool phase? Such blooms thrive in warm temperatures and on nutrients flushed from land by heavy rains and runoff. In a warmer world, heavy snowpack from a La Niña winter in some areas could melt during springtime into hotter conditions, making trapped nutrients available to algae. In those regions, “it might even be the case that La Niña is getting us more harmful algal blooms than El Niño would,” Merder said.

The La Niña that perspiring Americans might long for now is not what it used to be. “La Niña years now are warmer overall on the planet than big El Niño years were 25 years ago,” McPhaden said. Both climate phenomena have always been powerful. But in the 21st century, the cool phase is only a temporary antidote to the symptoms of climate change, and a fainter one at that. If greenhouse gases continue to warm our world, La Niña’s reprieve will only grow weaker.

This article has been updated to clarify La Niña's effects on algal blooms.

Scientists Are Very Worried About NASA’s Mars Plan

2024-05-21T11:55:54-04:00

Updated at 10:40 a.m. ET on May 22, 2024

In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover’s belly.

Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission, known as MSR for short, is one of the boldest undertakings in NASA history, as consequential as it is complicated. The endeavor, which involves sending an extra spacecraft to the red planet to retrieve the samples, serves as a precursor to getting future astronauts home from Mars. It’s a test of whether the United States can keep up with China’s space program, which is scheduled to return its own Mars samples in the 2030s. It could uncover new information about our planetary neighbor’s history, and reveal a picture of the cosmic wilderness that was the early solar system. Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard.

If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth. NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won’t arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected. At a press conference last month, NASA chief Bill Nelson repeatedly called the state of the Mars Sample Return mission “unacceptable,” a striking chastisement of his own agency, considering that MSR is an in-house effort. Officials have put out a call—to NASA’s own ranks and to private space companies—for “quicker and cheaper” plans that don’t require “huge technological leaps” to bring the samples home.

[Read: Scientists really, really want a piece of Mars]

NASA officials say that they remain committed to the return effort, but researchers—including the agency’s collaborators who work on the project—are concerned. “The path forward is not clear,” Aileen Yingst, a geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the Perseverance mission, told me. Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home. Last year, an independent review ordered by NASA ominously warned that “by abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the U.S. abandons the preeminent role that [President John F. Kennedy] ascribed to the scientific exploration of space.”

If and when the MSR tubes come home, their contents could dramatically shift our understanding of Mars. The first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars, in 1976, carried instruments designed to examine Martian soil for evidence of tiny, metabolizing life forms but didn’t find anything conclusive. Some bits of Martian rock, ejected by colliding asteroids, have made it to Earth as meteorites. (And scientists have tried to find proof of life in these, too). But such fragments arrive scorched by atmospheric reentry, their composition altered and contaminated from the journey. Pristine samples are far more tantalizing.

MSR would deliver Martian dirt straight from an area that scientists believe holds a promising chance at containing signs of life from 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover is exploring the shores of what scientists believe was once a lake, at a crater called Jezero, where the sedimentary rock may bear signs of a once-habitable world, or preserved life itself. The samples might also offer hints about Earth’s origin story. The rocks that existed here 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, have since been crushed, melted, and eroded away. But Mars, a world lacking plate tectonics and serious weather, still bears rocks from the time of its very formation.

[Read: The most overhyped planet in the galaxy]

The promise of such samples has been a top research priority for planetary scientists for over a decade. The original plan to do so, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is accordingly ambitious, involving several different spacecraft to retrieve the capsules, launch them into Martian orbit, and fly them back to Earth. No astronauts are involved, but Mars scientists have likened the mission choreography to the Apollo program in terms of complexity.

That plan was apparently destined to unravel from the start. NASA’s independent review found that MSR had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning" and was "organized under an unwieldy structure," with "unclear roles, accountability, and authority.” Technically ambitious missions always cost more, and MSR is arguably one of the most complicated that NASA has ever undertaken. But the scientists who help NASA set exploration priorities have no control over the budgets of the resulting programs—Congress does.

Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, are both likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.

[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]

Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.

For scientists who support Mars exploration, MSR is a problem, siphoning funds away from other efforts to study it. “There’s so many aspects to studying a planet that do not involve analyzing small amounts of rocks in the lab,” says Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at Western University, in Canada, who’s working on an international mission to map the ice deposits in Mars’s mid-latitude regions. NASA pulled its financial support from that project in 2022, citing MSR’s cost as part of its motivation. And planetary scientists have recommended prioritizing a mission to drill deep into the ice at the Martian poles, far from Perseverance’s domain, where conditions could be just comfortable enough to support small life forms now.

NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned. Lindsay Hays, a program scientist at NASA’s planetary-science division, told me that NASA will seek input from the science community about which sample tubes to return. “NASA has a responsibility to use taxpayer funds in the most effective and efficient way possible,” she said. “But it’s also part of our mandate to the nation to do things that have never been done before.”

[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]

Most planetary scientists aren’t happy with a potentially scaled-back approach either. “You’ve decimated the science, because now you’re not going to get the diversity that you could have if we brought back the full suite of samples,” Phil Christensen, a geologist at Arizona State University who co-chaired the community’s latest decadal survey, told me.

A badly delayed sample-return mission would fracture NASA’s grand vision for its Martian future. By the 2040s, NASA intends to be focused not on the red planet’s soil, but on sending astronauts there and, crucially, bringing them back. That operation relies on having successfully practiced launching off from Mars, which NASA hasn’t yet managed with MSR. Instead, the agency is back at the drawing board, hoping to find a way out of an $11 billion pit. Officials expect to finish reviewing new proposals and come to a decision on the mission’s future in the fall. Meanwhile, Perseverance chugs along, excavating the mythical oasis of Jezero Crater with each curated tube.

This article originally misstated which planet Enceladus orbits. It also misstated the target region of a Mars ice-mapping region.