Human spaceflight has been racking up new milestones. But we're still grappling with a fundamental question: Why go in the first place? When the four astronauts on board NASA's Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles. While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of Apollo 11--a spectacle that 20% of the world population watched live--Artemis II still attracted massive public interest. It drew tens of millions of viewers and inspired outpourings of "moon joy," a term coined spontaneously during the mission that became a viral sensation. The expedition is only the first in a planned series of ambitious missions.

As the threat of wildfire worsens in California and across the world, a growing number of federal agencies, nonprofit organizations and tech companies are racing to deploy new technology that will help combat flames from a whole new vantage point: outer space. New satellite missions backed by NASA, Google, SpaceX, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and other groups were announced this week and promise to advance early wildfire detection and help reduce fire damage by monitoring Earth from above. Collectively, the roster of big names, billionaires, government groups and nongovernmental organizations reflects a considerable interest in using new technology to solve some of humanity's biggest problems. Fire weather days have increased in Western U.S. over the last 50 years, with some of the largest jumps in California, according to a new report by Climate Central, a nonprofit news outlet that reports on climate change. Among them is the Earth Fire Alliance, a global nonprofit coalition that recently unveiled its vision for a constellation of more than 50 satellites that will focus specifically on wildfires and their ecological effects.

Experts discuss what is at stake in the AI race between the United States and China, warning it could'dictate the future of humanity.' As artificial intelligence (AI) systems rapidly advance, the U.S. and China are both investing time and resources into developing the technology, but experts are divided on who controls the most advanced systems, who will be the front-runner to shape free speech and power in modern society. "The race between the U.S. and China, I think it's going to dictate the future of humanity," Dr. Michael Capps, the CEO of Diveplane, told Fox News Digital. "The Chinese government, Chinese military, and Chinese technology are all working in concert to win the AI race," he added. "In the United States, I would say that US technologists are working on it really hard, but not the government, and not the military. President Xi is 100% focused on it. Putin has said whoever wins the air race, wins World War III before it happens."

Liu Boming took in the dizzy view. Around him lay the inky vastness of space. Over the next seven hours Liu and his colleague Tang Hongbo carried out China's second spacewalk, helped along by a giant robotic arm. Mission accomplished, the two taikonauts – China's astronauts – clambered back into their home for the next three months: Beijing's new space station. The core module of the station, named Tiangong, meaning "heavenly palace", was launched in April.

"The new space race at the geopolitical level is for computational power. Who can gather the most data and process that data the fastest? That is why both China and the US, frankly the EU as well, are spending a lot of money on quantum computers, incredibly fast supercomputers. And all of these things require chips," she explains.

Thankfully, in many cases, we live up to it. But our present digital reality is quite different, even sobering. Fighting terrorists for nearly 20 years after 9/11, we remained a flip-phone military in what is now a smartphone world. Infrastructure to support a robust digital force remains painfully absent. Consequently, service members lead personal lives digitally connected to almost everything and military lives connected to almost nothing.

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" -Peter Thiel The closing quarter of the twentieth century was peak tech innovation in the United States. AT&T's Bell Labs invented the information age with the transistor and data networking, and many transformative technologies tangential to its core business: from solar cells to the Unix operating system to lasers.1 Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) brought about human-computer interaction with the initial computer mouse, as well as laser printing and Ethernet networking.2 In the 80's Pixar was born, creating the first ever computer-animated sequence in a feature film with novel computer-generated imagery (CGI).3,4 At the same time Gates and Allen were hacking at something special that soon revolutionized computing, as were Wozniak and Jobs.5,6 Amidst the heyday of invention in the world of bits, the "space race" brought about massive innovation and accomplishments in the world of atoms: government competition between the US and Russia put humans on the moon for the first time.

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" -Peter Thiel The closing quarter of the twentieth century was peak tech innovation in the United States. AT&T's Bell Labs invented the information age with the transistor and data networking, and many transformative technologies tangential to its core business: from solar cells to the Unix operating system to lasers.1 Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) brought about human-computer interaction with the initial computer mouse, as well as laser printing and Ethernet networking.2 In the 80's Pixar was born, creating the first ever computer-animated sequence in a feature film with novel computer-generated imagery (CGI).3,4 At the same time Gates and Allen were hacking at something special that soon revolutionized computing, as were Wozniak and Jobs.5,6 Amidst the heyday of invention in the world of bits, the "space race" brought about massive innovation and accomplishments in the world of atoms: government competition between the US and Russia put humans on the moon for the first time.

The space projects have been dominated by government bodies until we saw the ambitious companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin diving into this diverse area. These two are the most prominent names in the private space community and are often put on a face-off due to the similarity of its founders in other areas as well. Owned by two of the most powerful businessmen of all time -- Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they have been on the competition radar for their interest in the area of autonomous vehicles. Similarly, in the space segment, while the two companies might look quite similar in its attempts to explore space, the ideology and the approach of these companies vary quite significantly. But one thing cannot be denied that they both are developing large, reusable vehicles capable of carrying people and satellites across space. While we have often heard about SpaceX's missions and launches over the past few years, Blue Origin does not come out to be so ambitious in gaining traction.

Elon Musk is a headline-maker, for sure. Perhaps that means that some of the technological magic of SpaceX is lost in the media vacuum. It's 50 years since man first landed on the moon, a crowning achievement of our species technologically and one of the most culturally defining moments of a century. In 1969, NASA landed human beings on a satellite that hangs in the sky with processing power 1,300 times smaller than that of a Nokia 3310. What on Earth – or off of it, for that matter – could we be capable of in 2019?