If you want to put people back on the moon, don't gut the agency in charge of getting them there. The senator wanted a promise. For the last six years--or maybe the last decade or quarter century, depending on how you count it--the United States and China had been locked in a space race, a contest to see which nation could put its people on the moon . Senator Ted Cruz wanted President Donald Trump's nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, to pledge that the US would not lose. Cruz brought a little surprise to Isaacman's confirmation hearing last April. It was a poster of the moon. On one side stood three astronauts and a giant Chinese flag. On the other were two more figures in space suits, with the tiniest Stars and Stripes planted in the lunar soil . Cruz apologized for the imbalance. "My team used ChatGPT," explained the senator, who chairs the committee that oversees NASA. Then Cruz, with a bit more seriousness, asked Isaacman, "Do we have your commitment that you will not allow the scenario on the right of this poster to happen? That China will not beat us to the moon?" Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who had paid for his own missions to space, replied, "Senator, I only see the left-hand portion of that poster."

NASA's Boss Just Shook Up the Agency's Plans to Land on the Moon Sean Duffy called out SpaceX for being "behind schedule" on a lunar lander and said he'd explore other options. NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency's plans to return humans to the moon. Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA's projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the moon from lunar orbit and back.

Elon Musk Is Out to Rule Space. With SpaceX and Starlink, Elon Musk controls more than half the world's rocket launches and thousands of internet satellites. Just off the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, the hotel's rooftop bar is open late. The bartender passes out shots and turns Ozzy up. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off, its orange plume glowing bright, about 12 miles due north up the Banana River. The "Iron Man" riff starts to blast. When we hear the thud of the sonic boom, most everyone lets out some kind of hoot. This is SpaceX's 95th launch of the year, one nearly every other day. That's more liftoffs than the rest of the world gets into space, combined. For our politics issue, WIRED examines the state of tech's influence on governmental power--and the people who will change everything in the future. On this particular night, this Falcon 9 took 28 Starlink internet satellites to orbit. Starlink, of course, is another Musk space venture that dominates its competitors.

It didn't take long to find community on campus. To my surprise, out of the dozen students at a welcome event for the Indigenous community, three grad students and an undergrad were in the aero-astro department. As a prospective Course 16 major and a FIRST Robotics alum, I was excited to discover that they planned to start a new team for the First Nations Launch (FNL) rocketry competition, a NASA Artemis Student Challenge. It was the perfect opportunity to merge my technical passion with my cultural roots. That first year, many people questioned the need for our team.

The Far-side Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets (FARSIDE) is a proposed mission concept to the lunar far side that seeks to deploy and operate an array of 128 dual-polarization, dipole antennas over a region of 100 square kilometers. The resulting interferometric radio telescope would provide unprecedented radio images of distant star systems, allowing for the investigation of faint radio signatures of coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events and could also lead to the detection of magnetospheres around exoplanets within their parent star's habitable zone. Simultaneously, FARSIDE would also measure the "Dark Ages" of the early Universe at a global 21-cm signal across a range of red shifts (z approximately 50-100). Each discrete antenna node in the array is connected to a central hub (located at the lander) via a communication and power tether. Nodes are driven by cold=operable electronics that continuously monitor an extremely wide-band of frequencies (200 kHz to 40 MHz), which surpass the capabilities of Earth-based telescopes by two orders of magnitude. Achieving this ground-breaking capability requires a robust deployment strategy on the lunar surface, which is feasible with existing, high TRL technologies (demonstrated or under active development) and is capable of delivery to the surface on next-generation commercial landers, such as Blue Origin's Blue Moon Lander. This paper presents an antenna packaging, placement, and surface deployment trade study that leverages recent advances in tethered mobile robots under development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which are used to deploy a flat, antenna-embedded, tape tether with optical communication and power transmission capabilities.

With a net worth of $154.3 billion, Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world. He even competes for the top title with Elon Musk in Forbes' Billionaires 2022, a wealthy list updated in real-time. And it's not surprising that Bezos has amassed massive wealth. A long list of companies is attached to his name, with Amazon leading the pack. Let's take a look at the many businesses of Jeff Bezos, from Amazon to Zappos: Bezos founded Amazon in July 1995 – predating tech giant Google.

China plans to open its new space station up to'tourism' within the next decade - sparking what the country hopes is a race to compete with the likes of private American space tourists such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson. China launched its Tiangong space station in 2021 - its first long-term space station project - with the final modules set to launch later this year. The country's announcement also comes as China continues to produce new billionaires at a blistering pace - much faster than any other nation on Earth. While there were no specific details included to determine what the future of space tourism in China will look like, officials have said it is likely that people without formal astronaut training could be launched into orbit'relatively soon.' Yang Liwei, who became the first Chinese astronaut back in 2003, said tourists visiting Tiangong'is not a matter of technology but of demand.' China is also thought to be working on a more tourist-friendly reusable spacecraft that could take up to seven astronauts at a time into space.

The robotics industry started off the year with acquisitions, 2022 predictions and product announcements. Our editorial team had no problem staying busy while keeping up with all of the news. Here are the Top 10 most popular robotics stories on The Robot Report in January 2022. Subscribe to The Robot Report Newsletter to stay updated on the robotics stories you need to know about. Magna International, a Canadian developer of car mobility technology, acquired the technology, intellectual property, and other assets from Optimus Ride, a Boston-based company developing SAE Level 4 autonomous vehicles (AVs).

From the Mars Ingenuity helicopter's first powered flight on another world to the launch of the James Webb telescope that will peer into the earliest epoch of the Universe, 2021 was a huge year for humanity's space endeavors. Beyond the science milestones, billionaires battled to reach the final frontier first, an all-civilian crew went into orbit, and Star Trek's William Shatner waxed profound about what it meant to see the Earth from the cosmos, as space tourism finally came into its own. Star Trek's William Shatner waxed profound about what it meant to see the Earth from the cosmos, as space tourism finally came into its own Photo: AFP / Patrick T. FALLON NASA's Perseverance Rover survived its "seven minutes of terror," a time when the craft relies on its automated systems for descent and landing, to touch down flawlessly on Mars' Jezero Crater in February. Since then, the car-sized robot has been taking photos and drilling for samples for its mission: determining whether the Red Planet might have hosted ancient microbial life forms. A rock sample return mission is planned for sometime in the 2030s.

From the Mars Ingenuity helicopter's first powered flight on another world to the launch of the James Webb telescope that will peer into the earliest epoch of the Universe, 2021 was a huge year for humanity's space endeavors. Beyond the science milestones, billionaires battled to reach the final frontier first, an all-civilian crew went into orbit, and Star Trek's William Shatner waxed profound about what it meant to see the Earth from the cosmos, as space tourism finally came into its own. Star Trek's William Shatner waxed profound about what it meant to see the Earth from the cosmos, as space tourism finally came into its own Photo: AFP / Patrick T. FALLON NASA's Perseverance Rover survived its "seven minutes of terror," a time when the craft relies on its automated systems for descent and landing, to touch down flawlessly on Mars' Jezero Crater in February. Since then, the car-sized robot has been taking photos and drilling for samples for its mission: determining whether the Red Planet might have hosted ancient microbial life forms. A rock sample return mission is planned for sometime in the 2030s.