Students still say the pledge in schools – PolitiFact

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An image thats being shared widely on social media reminiscences about the old days, and bemoans the political-correctness of contemporary times.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," it says. "My generation grew up reciting this every morning in school with my hand on my heart. They no longer do that for fear of offending someone! Lets see how many Americans will re-post and not care about offending someone!"

More than 54,000 people have shared this post, which was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

Students cant be forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance under a 1943 Supreme Court decision that found it violated their First Amendment rights.

But, as CNN reported in 2019, its still "recited in schools across the US every day by students standing stiffly with their hands over their hearts."

That year, an 11-year-old was arrested in Florida when he told a substitute teacher he would not stand for the pledge because he thought the American flag symbolized discrimination against Black people, according to CNN, though police said he was detained because he caused a disturbance at school, not because he wouldnt say the pledge.

Other, more recent news coverage shows that students in other states also have the option to stand for the pledge.

In August, an El Paso news station reported about how remote learning has affected students reciting the pledge. Some schools and teachers are not beginning the virtual day with the pledge, according to the station, but one elementary school begins its morning announcements with the pledge.

One parent said her children recited the pledge "every day in school last year."

At Whittier Tech in Massachusetts, "each day, teachers will take attendance, classes will say the pledge of allegiance and announcements will be given," according to a Sept. 18 press release from the high school about welcoming students back to campus.

In Johnson City, Tenn., a news station broadcasts different school classes saying the pledge on school days.

We rate this Facebook post False.

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Students still say the pledge in schools - PolitiFact

Progressives are regressive – JNS.org

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(September 22, 2020 / JNS) Progressives claim to represent the forces of change, reform and social justice. They say they care for the well-being of the voters. They allege that those who believe in the Constitution and Bill of Rights are cruel, and call them dangerous racists.

Yet they forget some of the most important words in the Declaration of Independence that framed our national mission:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

With those words in mind, lets take a quick look at key progressive policies, that actually embody Marxist, Socialist, Communist, authoritarian, atheist and anarchist ideas. These are policies that have consistently failed wherever they have been tried. Moreover, the progressive rulers of the Soviet Union and China killed nearly 100 million of their own people over the past century in the name of such ideology.

Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicateby email and never missour top stories

And then, lets take a look at the reality.

Life

1. They say: Defunding the police is necessary to protect minority communities from racist policemen.

Reality: Defunding the police is pure racism, because minorities suffer the most when gangs and drug lords take over.

2. They say: Medicare for all benefits everyone.

Reality: Medicare is a grossly underfunded entitlement program. Bringing in more beneficiaries will reduce access to service for everyone and will hasten the bankruptcy of the entire program.

3. They say: The economy must be shut down until a coronavirus vaccine is FDA approved. Joe Biden said, Let me be clear, I trust vaccines. I trust scientists. But I dont trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people cant either. Kamala Harris said, I would not trust Donald Trump [if a vaccine was approved] and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever hes talking about. I will not take his word for it.

Reality: The FDA would not approve a vaccine that is not safe. Moreover, no major pharmaceutical company would be willing to rush an unsafe product to market.

Liberty

1. They say: The majority of the U.S. population is systemically racist and believe in white privilege.

Reality: Though not perfect, America is one of the least racist societies in the world.

2. They say: The United States can be dramatically improved with progressive/socialist identity politics and social justice.

Reality: America is built on the equality of opportunity. Social justice is simply government-imposed equality of misery and poverty for all.

3. They say: Political correctness protects everyone from offensive language.

Reality: Political correctness is a violation of freedom of speech, as enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. It is an effort to control the expressions of free thought, based on the theory that everyone has a non-existent right not to be offended.

Pursuit of happiness

1. They say: White policemen are always guilty, whether or not they injure a black suspect during an arrest.

Reality: Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, including both the suspect and the arresting officer, regardless of the color of their skin.

2. They say: Huge tax increases on the rich are good for society and satisfy the need for social justice.

Reality: Huge private-sector tax increases take resources from the productive private sector, thereby reducing both private innovation and job growth.

3. They say: Elementary-school reopenings must be delayed due to COVID-19.

Reality: The risk of infection, hospitalization and death for young students is similar to that of the flu, and kids must maintain their educational pace and be allowed to benefit from socialization. There is some extra risk to the teachers, particularly if elderly, but the extra risk is not high enough to prohibit classroom learning throughout the educational system.

4. They say: Climate change is an existential threat to all life on our planet, largely due to our indiscriminate use of fossil fuels.

Reality: No one knows and no one can dictate natures behavior. Fossil fuel consumption in the United States is a relatively modest contributing factor (the U.S. produces only 15 percent of the worlds emissions of CO2), which is moderated by the increasing efficiency of the system. Technology continues to develop newer and better ways to harness energy and use it more efficiently so that it produces less pollution, and American emissions have been dropping. Moreover, the demand for climate and energy control is simply an excuse for canceling the industries (like coal and fracking) that the progressives dont like. Its a way to build up the governments power.

In reality, the so-called progressives are nothing but regressives, taking us backwards instead of forward. It is they who present the number one existential threat to our land of opportunity. Our country is based on equal protection under the law, as codified under the Constitution and Bill of Rights. These regressives want to take us back in time when immoral despots ruled. No way! Lets move forward, not backward.

Ken Abramowitz is the president and founder of SaveTheWest.

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Progressives are regressive - JNS.org

Just Like Freud’s Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory Will Be Discredited – The Federalist

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To many Americans, the rise of the woke must seem like a frighteningly realistic remake of the classic science fiction movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It does not take much exposure to leftist college activists and their like-minded sympathizers to feel like a significant percentage of the population has come under the spell of a ruthless alien ideology.

The forced resignation of The New York Timess editorial page editor James Bennet by staffers who objected to his publication of a conservative op-ed, the push by Princeton University professors to create a committee to oversee racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of the faculty, and the berating of DC diners who declined to raise their fists in support of Black Lives Matter demonstrators all of these highly publicized incidents are but glimpses of the much larger campaign to delegitimate U.S. history and its associated ideals.

What binds and fortifies the self-declared woke is a cynical academic philosophy known as critical race theory. Refined over decades from deconstructionism through political correctness to identity politics, it falsely brags to be the first to discover that the human mind can never know anything for certain.

So, having declared a limit to knowledge, critical race theory proceeds to assume that all cultures, no matter how noble they may appear, are inventions of the dominant power structure designed to keep other groups in line. Even in the United States, critical race theory insists, long-held beliefs in limited government, free markets, and the importance of family are simply camouflage for male privilege and the suppression of racial minorities. To be truly enlightened, the theory concludes, one must relentlessly denounce these and any related values.

Upon hearing this for the first time, most normal people quite naturally feel as if theyve missed a step. Indeed, how does accepting the unprovability of all worldviews justify the thoroughly discrediting of any one of them? Shouldnt acknowledging the minds limitations only make the truly wise person humbler and more curious?

For those not bothered by such questions, however, critical race theory has a built-in way to ensure they need never deal with them again: simply treat any skeptic as an unconscious dupe of the white, male power structure. In other words, jump as quickly as possible from debating ideas to attacking character.

If this convenient ideological insulation sounds vaguely familiar, it should. The rise of critical race theory is far from the first time that a flawed and seriously destructive social theory has flourished by declaring that any observed fault should be interpreted as a psychological defect in the observer.

One need only go back to the 1890s, when much of the intellectual world was smitten with a belief system known as psychoanalytic theory. Based on the research of a Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud, who claimed that emotionally disturbed patients experience symptom relief while sharing uncensored dreams and word associations, it argued that every person was motivated by desires, drives, and needs that were repressed in childhood.

Promising the kind of authority that could be claimed by anyone with a knowledge of humanitys real motivations, Freuds ideas were quickly taken up by a variety of groups, both inside and outside of medicine, to advance their interests. This was especially true of the media, which regularly sought the opinions of psychoanalysts to give their magazine, newspaper, and broadcast reports credibility.

By the 1960s, psychoanalysis was being used to justify social changes at least as dramatic as what todays woke have proposed. When counterculture gurus like Timothy Leary, R. D. Laing, and Will Shutz began suggesting that it might be healthier to just express ones repressed childhood desires, rather than put a lid on them, young people across America, some already protesting the Vietnam War, readily agreed. The result was nearly a decade of epidemic drug use, campus rioting, and cultural attacks on traditional morality.

While Freuds psychoanalytic theory always had its share of thoughtful critics, defenders of the theory often resorted to a tautology-ridden, woke-like defense: anyone who challenged Freud was said to be denying his own unconscious conflicts and was, therefore, to be ignored. The retort proved to be so persuasive that at one point, the chair of psychiatry at every major U.S. medical school was occupied by a psychoanalyst.

What finally did manage to discredit psychoanalytic theory ending its ability to justify any kind of social revolution is worth recalling, for it suggests how the current popularity of todays critical race theory will collapse. Beginning in the 1990s, as pressure grew on health insurance companies to pay for psychological problems as well as physical ones, efforts were made to more rigorously evaluate the different therapies.

The studies that followed showed that nearly every emotional complaint could be treated far more quickly, effectively, and economically without psychoanalysis, which seemed to be no more useful than doing nothing at all. Psychoanalysis thrived for nearly a century as an intellectual justification for a multitude of movements, but it couldnt survive the failure to deliver on its foundational promise: improved mental health.

Critical race theory has a foundational promise: advancing wokeness will automatically improve the lives of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. This is, admittedly, a much harder contention to debunk directly, given that wed somehow have to get inside the minds of all the self-identified woke and then document how their outlook has failed to help different social groups. There is an indirect test, however, that has been going on for quite some time.

More than a generation ago, the late economist Milton Friedman suggested that all parents, especially poor and minority parents, be allowed to take the funding their communities would normally spend on their childs education and direct it to any placement they wished. Because of opposition from teacher unions, people have come to think of his school choice policy as just another educational reform.

As Friedman himself understood, however, it is an approach to learning that encapsulates all the values critical race theory most intensely despises: academic achievement, family cohesion and support, religious faith, and respect for tradition. To the extent, then, that school choice tangibly delivers for Americas minorities what critical race theory does not, its very success undercuts any reason to be woke.

At present, there are 66 experimental school choice programs in America, involving more than half the states. While the programs cumulatively involve only a tiny fraction of the countrys 56.4 million K-12 students, more than 150 studies have shown that the minority children who have participated not only score as well academically as their white peers academically but are just as likely to graduate high school, go to college, and graduate with a degree. Equally impressive is the fact that minority participants report far fewer problems with prejudice or discrimination.

How long the woke of today can remain oblivious to what truly improves the lives of racial and ethnic minorities likely depends on how long it will take the growing number of Friedman-like programs to become widely noticed. In Florida, where school choice plans are more common but still represent a fraction of the states children, black and Hispanic moms stunned local progressives in 2018 by providing the margin needed to elect conservative Republican and school choice advocate Ron DeSantis the states current governor.

That brings us to the 2020 election and the fact that Republicans have abandoned their usually elaborate party platform to back just a few critical items among them, expanded school choice. Few seem to have any idea just how much a GOP victory, then, would jeopardize the viability of wokeness. For the sooner more Americans see what really leads to racial and ethnic equality, the sooner critical race theory will join psychoanalysis in the historical dustbin of discredited intellectual fads.

Dr. Andrews was executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy from 1999 to 2009. He is the author of Living Spiritually in the Material World (Fidelis Books).

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Just Like Freud's Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory Will Be Discredited - The Federalist

Nobody is Charlie anymore | Julian Schvindlerman | The Blogs – The Times of Israel

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Should a bearded jihadist, armed with a dagger, hiding in a remote cave in Asia or in a tent in some desert in the Middle East, have editorial authority over what is published in a European magazine? Many think so, particularly in Western progressive quarters and especially when it comes to cartoons of the prophet of Islam. The editors of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo think otherwise, and that is why they have republished the Muhammad cartoons that led to a brutal terrorist attack on their offices more than five years ago.

They have not taken the decision lightly: 17 colleagues lost their lives in that attack. Precisely in their honor, Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons, on cue with the beginning of the trial of the perpetrators accomplices at the beginning of this month. Al-Qaeda was quick to threaten them. If your freedom of expression does not respect limits, prepare to face the freedom of our actions it declared in a statement issued on September 11, an easily recognizable anniversary date.

The leftist Charlie Hebdo journalists paid the highest possible price for their indirect solidarity with the right-wing journalists of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. To recall: in 2005 this newspaper published cartoons that ridiculed the prophet of Islam. At the time global jihadism was at its prime. The previous year, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh had been stabbed on the streets for making a film about misogyny in Islam. Islamists tried to kill the Jyllands Posten cartoonists, the Danish embassy in Lebanon was burned down and the one in Islamabad was bombed. The following year, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in the German town of Regensburg in which he associated Islam with violence. As a result, a fatwa was issued against him and Christians were killed in the Middle East. Meanwhile in France, Jacques Lefranc, from the daily France Soir, decided to reproduce the Danish cartoons. When he was fired for it, Charlie Hebdo director Philippe Val chose to publish those cartoons. On its cover, Muhammad was shown saying: It is difficult to be loved by idiots, in reference to the jihadists.

A decade later, two armed Islamists gunned down much of the French magazines staff. A week later, Charlie Hebdo republished a cartoon of Muhammad on its cover, in a million-copy edition. And it did so again, in 2020. A magazine editorial vowed We will never lie down. We will never give up, warned that it is not just a trial about our past, but about our future and affirmed:

So, we do not need one trial, but ten, twenty, a hundred. Against the perpetrators, but they are dead. Against their accomplices: they will be present. But also against cowardice, cynicism, conceit, ignorance, betrayal, laziness, opportunism, blindness, self-righteousness, superficiality, political calculation, forgetfulness, casualness, defeatism, indecisiveness, lack of foresight and a thousand other shortcomings which seem banal when taken individually, but taken together led to the extermination of a newspaper.

Brendan ONeill, editor of the British website Spiked, agreed:

Indeed, as the trial of the alleged accomplices begins this week, it is worth asking whether there were other accomplices to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, too. Not violent accomplices; not people who provided logistics and weaponry, as these 14 are accused of doing. No, intellectual accomplices, moral accomplices, a cultural worldview that had already demonised and even criminalised offensive speech and hate speech long before the two gunmen stormed the Charlie Hebdo offices. This massacre didnt happen in a vacuum. It happened at a time when PC censorship was growing, censorious wokeness was emerging, and the bizarre idea that people have the right not to be offended was being institutionalised in universities and in political circles []

This machinery of political correctness was also an accomplice to the events in Paris in 2015. That massacre can be seen as the armed wing of political correctness, the nadir of the reactionary, regressive idea that people and ideologies have the right never to be questioned or ridiculed, and that anyone who does question or ridicule them deserves to be punished whether that is by being hounded, sacked, arrested or, in the one-step-further outlook of the Islamist killers of January 2015, murdered.

Historically, Charlie Hebdo was criticized from right and left. Conservatives accused it of being disrespectful of emblems and traditions, progressives accused it of offending religious and cultural minorities. In fact, it is a satirical magazine and as such it has also mocked with drawings in very bad taste the French political class, the Catholic Church, the Jews, the United States and even the corpse of Michael Jackson. Exposing Muhammad or Islam to their singular esprit satirique should not have ended with the death of 17 of their journalists.

Flemming Rose, the editor of Jyllands-Posten, opined during an interview with the American Daily Beast in 2017:

Whats interesting is that Jyllands-Posten is a conservative newspaper whereas Charlie Hebdo is oriented to the left. Some would call them socialist. But this is all about a liberal democracys right to freedom of the press and freedom of speech. And it doesnt matter if youre liberal or conservative. In this case, Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo stood for the same principles and have for many years.

It should be noted that many newspapers around the world reproduced some of the original Jyllands-Posten cartoons, albeit when reporting the news more than as a gesture of collegial solidarity or in defense of freedom. Since then, Charlie Hebdo has become a disobedient minority, simultaneously fighting the bigots of radical Islam and the politically correct cultural elites of the West, both of whom see it as a heretic. Its editors understood more than others that behind the physical attack on their magazine in 2015, there was a symbolic blow against the principles of liberal democracies. It is good, then, to see that they are not giving up and continue to defend freedom of expression with typical irreverence. Although it is quite sad to see that Charlie Hebdo continues to do so in disturbing solitude. Je suis Charlie that famous and moving slogan so in vogue that dark January 2015 lasted less than a sigh.

Julian Schvindlerman is an Argentine writer and journalist specializing in Middle East affairs. He lectures on World Politics at the University of Palermo and is a regular contributor to Infobae and Perfil. He is the author of The Hidden Letter: A History of an Arab-Jewish Family, Triangle of Infamy: Richard Wagner, the Nazis and Israel; Rome and Jerusalem: Vatican policy toward the Jewish state; and Land for Peace, Land for War.

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Nobody is Charlie anymore | Julian Schvindlerman | The Blogs - The Times of Israel

Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Lies and other deadly stuff – Rutland Herald

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Alexei Navalny is the Russian opposition leader who was recently poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent thats Vladimir Putins preferred means of disposing of old spies and new political leaders who displease him. I was listening to a spokesman for the Russian president, who was serving up a string of improbable hypotheticals, creative excuses and transparent lies purporting to prove Putin didnt poison his most recently poisoned political opponent and the world was being unfair and unreasonable to suspect him. It was as if Id been transported back to my Cold War youth and the Pravda bulletins that really were fake news.

As I listened, though, I realized what I was hearing sounded more recently familiar. From Sean Spicers preposterous insistence that President Trumps inaugural crowd was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration period, to Kellyanne Conways Orwellian doctrine of alternative facts, to Sarah Huckabee Sanders slip of the tongue that countless FBI agents had told the White House theyd lost confidence in James Comey, a baseless lie not founded on anything that she was compelled to retract under oath, Trump White House press briefings more closely resemble the six o clock news with Joe McCarthy than an honest presentation of the facts.

Most recently, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnaney denied that the president had misled the American people about the virus, despite the fact hes on tape in his own voice repeatedly misleading us about the virus, and conceding that misleading us was his deliberate intent.

In taped interviews with reporter Bob Woodward, the president volunteered that rather than accurately inform the public about the virus, hed decided to play it down.

As early as Feb. 7, he acknowledged to Woodward on tape that the coronavirus was deadly stuff, more deadly than even your strenuous flus, with a 5% versus 1% and less than 1% mortality rate. Meanwhile, for nearly another two months in his daily statements to the public to us he continued to liken the virus to a regular flu, all the while insisting we dont turn the country off for the regular flu.

In early February, he told Woodward about a setback, that the virus was particularly tricky because it goes through the air. You just breathe the air, and thats how its passed. Yet he continued to tell the public us that the virus was low risk, a problem thats going to go away, and the U.S. case count within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.

Even after learning the virus was airborne, hes persistently dismissed mask-wearing as a matter of political correctness, and apart from paying occasional lip service to the overwhelming medical consensus, has with words and by example failed to encourage and actively discouraged masks and social distancing.

In mid-March, he was telling Woodward its not just old people, that its plenty of young people, too. But as late as August, he was still telling us, including parents, children are almost and I would almost say definitely but almost immune from this disease. They dont have a problem. They just dont have a problem.

Hes justified his serial deceptions on the grounds he didnt want to create a panic. He nonsensically claims his critics wanted him instead to come out screaming theres going to be great death.

Its possible to be both calm and truthful.

Just as its possible to be calm and a raving liar.

The president and his minions have likened his conduct to Winston Churchills during the Blitz and to the British wartime maxim, Keep calm and carry on. Except Churchill warned his people he had nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. He cautioned them to expect hard and heavy tidings.

Churchill told his people the truth.

The president also compares himself to FDR and his 1933 inaugural assurance that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Except FDR meant the nameless, unreasoning, subjective fear that had settled on and paralyzed us during the Depression. The virus, in contrast, is a fearsome, objective force all its own.

FDR didnt hide the truth the day after Pearl Harbor. When he asked Congress to declare war, he included a frank litany of Japanese advances and Allied defeats. He acknowledged there was no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

For someone who claims hes intent on avoiding national panic, President Trump is doing everything he can to foment it. In one Michigan speech alone, he accused Joe Biden of planning to surrender our country to the violent left-wing mob, overwhelm your state with poorly vetted migrants from jihadist regions, ban American energy, confiscate your guns, shut down auto production, delay the vaccine, destroy your suburbs, indoctrinate your children, eliminate your job, lock law-abiding Americans into their homes, encourage rioters and vandals, usher in a murder rate and crime wave like youve never seen, cut short the lives of thousands of young African-American citizens, and install somebody from Antifa as a member of your suburb.

According to the president, Biden wont rest until hes flooded your neighborhood with rioters, arsonists, and flag-burners, and wiped out production of pick-up trucks.

Lets assume for a moment, though, that you were a leader who sincerely believed it was needful to hide the truth from your people to help keep them calm.

If your concern was sincere, you wouldnt discourage them from wearing masks once you knew a deadly disease was being transmitted through the air.

You wouldnt invite them to rallies and sit them cheek-to-jowl at galas on the South Lawn.

You wouldnt tell parents their children were immune if you knew the truth was they could sicken and die.

Sometimes a lie is just what you tell when you dont want to look as bad as you are.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.

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Poor Elijah's Almanack: Lies and other deadly stuff - Rutland Herald

Why I wince when I hear the words ‘white privilege’ – theday.com

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Asking President Donald Trump how he feels about "white privilege" is sort of like asking a young fish how it feels about water.As the late author David Foster Wallace tells the fable in an unusually famous commencement address, the young fish doesn't know what water is. He's way too close to the subject.

That's how President Trump sounded when renowned journalist Bob Woodward, son of an Illinois lawyer and judge, asked him this question in a June interview, one of 18 Woodward conducted with Trump for "Rage," the author's latest book to probe the Trump presidency.

"Do you have any sense that that privilege has isolated and put you in a cave to a certain extent," Woodward asked, "as it put me and I think lots of white privileged people in a cave, and that we have to work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country?"

"No," Trump responded, slightly taken aback by the question. "You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn't you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don't feel that at all."

Too bad. If he did, he might be doing better in the polls. A Marist poll in June found two-thirds of Americans thought Trump has made racial tensions worse since the death of George Floyd, under a police officer's knee, touched off a nationwide racial reckoning. Yet since then his reelection strategy appears to be more interested in rewinning voters who already have supported him than in broadening his outreach. You might say that he's taking advantage of his privileged position.

But still, I wince when I hear the words "white privilege." I don't deny its existence. But, as I try to encourage the cross-racial dialogue that we so desperately need in our increasingly diverse country, I find the term often proves to be more trouble than it's worth.For one thing, when I say it to mean its original academic meaning systems that benefit white people over nonwhite people in some societies I hear from white people who accuse me of accusing them of racism. Theygo on to tell me about how hard they and their ancestors worked to make it on their own in this country. I get it.

In fact, I mean nothing personal. I am only using it in the way the fabled fish is intended to hear about water. It's all around us and for the common good we need to understand it and deal with it, or it surely will deal with us in the most damaging ways.

Unfortunately, President Trump, despite his frequent attacks against "political correctness" and "cancel culture," recently has responded with cancellation, particularly of racial sensitivity training in federal agencies. He's gunning for any training that addresses such topics as "white privilege" and related "critical race theory," which he calls "divisive, anti-American propaganda."

Citing "press reports" of training sessions at which employees were allegedly told "virtually all white people contribute to racism," Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, ordered the review and possible cancellations in a Sept. 4 letter to federal agencies.Trump went typically Trumpian with a series of tweets the next day, retweeting about 20 from conservative media and others praising his new blow against the PC elite.

Well, as with "white privilege," I, too, have objected to some of the excesses of "PC," "cancel culture" and "critical race theory" that I have encountered on campus and elsewhere. But we talked out the disputes. Efforts to resolve and learn from cultural differences should be discussed and debated, not muzzled.

But this is an election year, isn't it? Not surprisingly, Trump's retweets express delight over the approval his supposed clampdown has received from conservative media as Election Day approaches. To a tweet that called "critical race theory the greatest threat to western civilization," for example, Trump responded "Not any more." All hail our hero.

Media guru Marshall McLuhan declared back in the 1960s, "Propaganda ends where dialogue begins." Government should try to bring various groups together, not drive more wedges and wedge issues to tear us further apart.

You can't have open educational dialogue if only one side gets to do all the talking. That's the worst kind of privilege, regardless of color.

Clarence Page's columns are distributed by the Tribune Content Agency.

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Why I wince when I hear the words 'white privilege' - theday.com

Councillor marks anniversary of mother’s murder with call for justice for women – Winnipeg Sun

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Kleins mother got married when he was in his late teens. The marriage was characterized by fighting and yelling.

It just seemed normal everywhere we went, he explained. Even if we were at my moms brothers home or whatever, there always seemed to be that. Looking back, I can see the stress and I can understand it. But I think my stepfather was very clever in the sense that he would do (bad) stuff when nobody was around, and our mom just didnt tell us.

On the day of the murder, Klein was watching a hockey game when he heard a stranger shouting his name at the arena. He knew something was seriously wrong. He called his uncle, who bluntly said his mother was dead.

We knew that hed killed her that hed strangled her, he said. My brothers and I had to take on the responsibility of arranging the funeral. What did we know? We walked into the funeral home and tried to pick out a casket. My brothers just left. There were no resources that reached out to kids. When we lost our mom, we lost contact with everyone. It was just us and we learned how to survive.

Kleins relationship with his brothers improves year by year. The tragedy has strengthened his resolve to pursue justice for women.

Nothing was ever handed to me in this life, he said. And its funny because a lot of people think that where Ive gone in my career is because of privilege.

In terms of the powers of political correctness that have sometimes tried to stereotype him, Klein said, It makes me sad for them, quite frankly. We are so busy judging everybody. I honestly believe that a lot of politicians, and no disrespect to them, dont speak from experience. They dont really get it. They want to talk about what they think is right. Id like to sit them down and say, You have absolutely no clue what youre talking about.

jsnell@postmedia.com

Twitter @JamesWestgateSn

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Councillor marks anniversary of mother's murder with call for justice for women - Winnipeg Sun

Mitchells Musings: Ethics class evolves with the times – Vernon Morning Star

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The scene: the first day of an ethics class at an unnamed American university where the students have returned to campus (or are online).

Professor Smith: OK, class, welcome to Ethics 101. Here, we will study the importance of ethical behaviour in business, government, religion, sports, media, education and just everyday life.

Student: With all due respect, sir, are you serious?

Professor: Excuse me?

Student: Well, I can think of scandals in all those categories that pretty much disprove that ethics plays a role in any way, shape or form in todays America.

Professor: OK, Ill bite. Like, for instance?

Student: Well, the stock market continues to go up and up and make the rich richer and richer due to the belief that FAANG otherwise known as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet, formerly known as Google are going to get even richer as largely unregulated and untouchable tech companies make even more and more during a pandemic that forces people to turn to the Net for supplies and entertainment and communication needs, meanwhile killing local retail and media and community and leaving millions of Americans unemployed and living off government handouts that cant go on for much longer or were all doomed. (Takes a breath)

Professor: Oh, that thing. Anything else?

Student: Well, weve got a president whos on the record with more than 20,000 false or misleading claims, so far, and that doesnt even count his golf game, who lied to us about the seriousness of the pandemic to protect his re-election chances, along with the stock market. A guy who says he did it to not spread panic, even though spreading panic and chaos is pretty much his thing, especially when it comes to describing political unrest in the streets or what the left-wing zealots will do if Joe Biden actually wins. A new book comes out virtually every day by former staff and family members largely describing him as unfit to govern and having no moral compass, yet if Biden falters even a little and hes 77 years old Trump could win the November 3 election, and hes 74. How are either one of these dinosaurs going to lead us in this world of ever-escalating change anyway?

Professor: OK, you have a point there. Religion?

Student: Two words for you, professor. Jerry Falwell, Jr. OK, thats three. And he was one of the first religious supporters of Trump that led to even more fundamentalist Christians jumping on board, despite the Access Hollywood tapes and countless other misdeeds, resulting in Trumps triumph, and where we are today. And all because they needed a pool boy.

Professor: Sports?

Student: Houston Astros, the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick, Lance Armstrong, the NBA and China.

Professor: Education? Surely education has maintained its ethics, at least somewhat? After all people have to believe in something. Thats why were here.

Student: Does Lori Loughlin and company and the biggest college admissions scandal of all time ring a bell? How did that happen? Also political correctness run amok on campuses. Its spread to the real, ahem, world.

Professor: Media?

Student: Well, Fox News might as well be Trump TV as they turn themselves into pretzels daily to cover for the presidents behaviour or lack thereof. And thats getting tougher and tougher to do, so theyre earning their millions. And the left-leaning mainstream media ignores anything that doesnt fit its progressive narrative or political correctness, and then theres social media that is so into clicks that the truth is often irrelevant, or worse, may get in the way of more clicks. And local media are so challenged by FAANG and others that their days may be numbered. And then whos going to hold local politicians accountable?

Professor: OK, OK, youve made your point. I think I know the answer though. Class, I stand corrected, welcome to Ethics 2020, the age of alternative facts.

Student: I can live with that. Guess I have to, huh?

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Mitchells Musings: Ethics class evolves with the times - Vernon Morning Star

Astronauts take shelter as space station dodges orbital junk – Space.com

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The International Space Station just dodged a fast-moving hunk of orbiting junk.

Controllers maneuvered the station away from a potential collision with a piece of debris today (Sept. 22) at 5:19 p.m. EDT (2119 GMT). They did so by firing the thrusters on a Russian Progress cargo spacecraft that's docked to the orbiting lab's Zvezda service module, NASA officials said in an update today.

The three astronauts currently living aboard the station NASA's Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner sheltered in the station's Russian segment during the maneuver to be closer to their Soyuz spacecraft, the NASA update stated.

This was done "out of an abundance of caution," the update said. "At no time was the crew in any danger."

Related: 7 wild ways to clean up space junk

The trio's stay near the Soyuz, which will bring them back down to Earth next month, was quite brief.

"Maneuver Burn complete. The astronauts are coming out of safe haven," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted at 5:25 p.m. EDT (2125 GMT) today, just six minutes after the Progress thruster firing.

Space junk is a growing problem in Earth orbit. Nearly 129 million pieces of debris are whizzing around our planet at the moment, about 34,000 of which are more than 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide, according to estimates by the European Space Agency.

At the International Space Station's altitude, roughly 250 miles (400 kilometers) up, material zooms around Earth at about 17,500 mph (28,200 kph) so fast that a collision with even a tiny shard of debris could do serious damage to the orbiting lab.

Hence today's evasive action. The 150-second-long Progress burn boosted the station above the trajectory of the unknown piece of debris, which would have taken the junk within 0.86 miles (1.39 kilometers) of the orbiting lab at 6:21 p.m. EDT (2221 GMT), the NASA update stated.

Junk-dodging maneuvers are far from unheard of for the orbiting lab. The station has now made three such moves in 2020 alone, Bridenstine said today in another tweet, stressing that "debris is getting worse!"

And in January 2012, controllers moved the station to avoid a potential collision with a piece of junk generated by a much-criticized 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test.

This story was updated at 7 p.m. EDT on Sept. 22 to include information from another tweet by Jim Bridenstine.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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Contestants will compete for a SpaceX trip to the International Space Station in new reality TV show – TechCrunch

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Theres a reality TV competition show in the works that will feature a 2023 trip to the International Space Station as the grand prize, Deadline reports. The production company behind the show, which will be called Space Hero, has booked a seat on a SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft set to make the trip to the ISS in 2023, and will make it the reward for whoever comes out the winner in a competition among everyday people from any background who share a deep love for space exploration, according to the report.

The competition will be an ersatz astronaut training program of sorts, including physical challenges, as well as puzzles and problem-solving tasks, as well as emotionally challenging scenarios, according to Deadline. That will lead up to what producers are currently planning will be a live episode featuring a global viewer vote about who ultimately will win. The show will also include documenting the winners ISS trip, including their launch and 10-day space station stay, as well as their return journey and landing.

To bring all these pieces together, the production team is working with Axiom Space, a private space travel services provider and mission operator, as well as NASA, with which its discussing what might be done in terms of STEM education add-ons for this planned programming.

Deadline says that Survivor creator and reality industry giant Mark Burnett has previously tried multiple times to create a reality show with a trip to space as the main component. One such effort, an NBC-based program called Space Race, was created in partnership with Richard Branson and focused on Virgin Galactic, but it was ended after that companys fatal testing accident in 2015.

Theres also a movie production in the works thats bound for the space station as a filming location, and those efforts are being spearheaded by Tom Cruise, who will star in the yet untitled project. NASA has repeatedly said it welcomes increased commercialization of low-Earth orbit and the ISS, and it also intentionally sought out private partners like SpaceX for its U.S.-based astronaut launch vehicles, in the hopes that they would be able to book other, private clients for flights to help defray mission costs.

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Contestants will compete for a SpaceX trip to the International Space Station in new reality TV show - TechCrunch

SpaceX Sending Tom Cruise To The Space Station In 2021 – Hackaday

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Several months after NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed the project was in the works, sources are now reporting that Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman will officially be making the trip to the International Space Station in October of 2021 to film scenes for an as of yet untitled movie. Cruise and Liman previously worked together on the science fiction spectacle Edge of Tomorrow in 2014, which may give us a hint at what the duo are planning for their trip to the final frontier.

Industry insiders claim that the two film makers and potentially a female co-star will fly aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule under the command of Michael Lpez-Alegra, a veteran astronaut who currently holds the American record for number and duration of extra-vehicular activities (EVAs). The mission is being organized by Axiom Space, which previously announced they would perform a series of privately funded flights to the ISS as a precursor to constructing their own commercial expansion to the orbiting laboratory.

Of course, with more than a year before liftoff, anything could happen. SpaceX has been linked, officially or otherwise, to several private trips to space that literally and figuratively never got off the ground.

Mars-One was touting concept art that showed a fleet of modified SpaceX Dragons on the Red Planet as far back as 2012, and Elon Musk himself once announced that the Falcon Heavy would send private passengers on a trip around the Moon by the end of 2018. But to date, a pair of NASA astronauts have been the only humans to actually fly on SpaceX hardware.

Undoubtedly, some will see this flight of fancy as a waste of valuable resources. After all, theres no shortage of scientists and researchers who would be more deserving of trip to a space than Jerry Maguire. But according to Bridenstine, the hope is that a big budget Hollywood film featuring scenes shot on the ISS could do for NASA what Top Gun once did for the Navy:

There was a day when I was in elementary school and I saw Top Gun. From that day, I knew I was going to be a Navy pilot. If we can get Tom Cruise to inspire an elementary kid to join the Navy and be a pilot, why cant we get Tom Cruise to inspire the next Elon Musk? Thats what we need.

While we might not all agree on who the next generation of engineers should look to for inspiration, the impact that Top Gun had on Navy recruitment in the 80s and 90s is well established. If sending Tom Cruise to space for a few weeks might help inspire more kids to look into a STEM education, its probably worth a shot. Though it seems like Tom Hanks and his fellow Apollo 13 crew mates did a respectable enough job celebrating the incredible engineering behind NASAs greatest triumph without actually going into orbit themselves.

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SpaceX Sending Tom Cruise To The Space Station In 2021 - Hackaday

See the International Space Station, 3 planets in tonight’s sky – 69News WFMZ-TV

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Over the weekend, we had record-setting lows in the Lehigh Valley.

While the nights have been chilly, the cold has lead to the best stargazing conditions we've had in months.

Cold air is dry air, and light travels easier in dry air, which is why the night sky looks so nice the past few nights.

This is also why the sky has looked so blue the last few days.

The have looked very blue the last few days because our air is drier than usual.

On Monday night*, here's what you can see:

The sunset is now in the 6 PM hour, toward the end of the 6 PM hour.

*While this article was written for Monday, September 21, you can still see all of these planets in the night sky. Saturday, October 3 is the next time to see the space station.

Jupiter and Saturn will be in the southern sky, and they'll be right next to each other. At dusk, Jupiter is the brightest object in the sky. Saturn is to the left of Jupiter.

Both are somewhat low in the sky. They set (dip below the horizon) around 1 AM.

Look for Jupiter and Saturn in the south sky.

Mars is spectacular. It's the brightest and biggest object in the night in the middle of the night (12-4 A.M.). You'll definitely notice its orange color. It's high in the southern sky then.

It rises in the east sky at dusk, and it's not as big. It still looks orange, though.

Mars is high in the south sky.

The International Space Stationwill cross over us again on Saturday, October 3 for four minutes at 7:43 P.M. It'll first appear in the west sky, near where the sun sets. Then, it'll travel low in the sky to the northeastern horizon. But, before it reaches the northeast horizon, it'll suddenly vanish!

The International Space Station flew over us on Monday, September 21 at 7:31 P.M. It looked an airplane, and it will look like that again on Saturday, October 3.

The International Space station will look like an airplane flying across the sky. It will have a smooth, steady motion. You'll know you saw it if it vanishes before reaching the horizon.

This happens because the International Space Station runs into the darkness of the Earth's shadow. We see the space station in the first place because it's reflecting sunlight.

If you want to see the space station, get the exact time for your community here. It's best to go out when it'll be in the sky for four minutes or longer.

The Moonis in the night sky right at sunset for only a few hours. It will set at 10 P.M. tonight, leaving very dark skies for the rest of the night.

If you see the moon, it'll be a crescent shape because we just had a new moon last week. The moon gets half full later this week.

Watch the International Space Station fly over you Monday night.

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See the International Space Station, 3 planets in tonight's sky - 69News WFMZ-TV

The Elusive Peril of Space Junk – The New Yorker

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For decades, the International Space Station has been hovering over Earth, in an orbit somewhere between two hundred and three hundred miles above sea level. Its massive rectilinear structure, resembling an Eisenhower-era TV antenna, contains hundreds of thousands of solar cells and a series of pressurized modules that can support life and equipment, all of it weighing close to a million pounds. Since 2000, people have been living on the station, in an area comparable to a six-bedroom house: humanitys most expensive real estate. The station is also the fastest structure a person can live in. It orbits the planet at more than seventeen thousand miles an hour, many times faster than the Earths rotation. A day on the station, from sunrise to sunrise, lasts just ninety minutes.

In the early hours of July 16, 2015, members of the U.S.Air Force noticed an alarming development involving the I.S.S. Since the Cold War, the military has maintained an extensive space-surveillance network. Every minute, tracking stations across the globe relay a cascade of data to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, in a bunker carved deep beneath two thousand feet of granite in Colorado. Some of the information is set aside for NORAD and other national-security organizations. Other portions are forwarded to the 18th Space Control Squadron, in California, which works to prevent collisions in the sky.

Sometime before three that morning, the surveillance network glimpsed a hunk of debris hurtling toward the I.S.S. A well-known piece of space trash, it had been labelled Object No. 36912 in an extensive inventory of orbital artifacts known as the NORAD catalogue. It had broken off of a Soviet military weather satellite, which was launched in 1979 from a Cold War facility near the Arctic Circle. The cylindrical satelliteresembling an old-fashioned boilerwas designed to work for less than two years. In the ensuing decades, it had been shedding fragments. That April, another piece of it had threatened the space station.

Object No. 36912 was likely a torn-off piece of thermal shielding; it appeared to be relatively light, and no bigger than a large dinner plate. For years, it had circled safely above the I.S.S. But its mass and shape made it highly sensitive to atmospheric dragits orbit shifting dramatically as the atmosphere expanded and contracted in response to solar activity. Several weeks earlier, the atmosphere had ballooned, causing Object No.36912s orbit to suddenly decay.

As the debris spiralled downward, gathering speed, the Air Force was keeping a close watch, but small things in space can easily evade detection. The object was visible to just two radar stations, in Alaska and in Floridaand then it went entirely dark for more than a week. On July 16th, when it reappeared, Air Force analysts quickly updated their predictions: the object would make a close pass of the space station at 5:29A.M. (Mission Control time, in Houston). It would clear the spacecraft by about fourteen miles, but penetrate a safety zone around the I.S.S. called the box. Then it would loop around the globe, falling farther, and come within striking distancerisking impact, or a conjunction. If the chance that something in the box will collide with the I.S.S. is greater than one in ten thousand, the condition is red. With Object No. 36912, the probability was more than one in a thousand.

At 2:44 A.M., the Space Control Squadron notified Jim Cooney, the I.S.S.s trajectory-operations officer. Cooney, a NASA veteran, was asleep at home, but an app on his phone triggers a high-volume alarm for such alerts. Your brain gets engaged really fast, he told me. He had become accustomed to late-night calls. Only a month earlier, NASA had adjusted the spacecrafts trajectory to dodge a fragment of a Minotaur rocket: a former intercontinental ballistic missile repurposed to ferry cargo into space.

These maneuvers have been performed more than two dozen times, and can be executed without much trouble if Houston has five and a half hours notice. But, when Cooney called the Air Force, he learned that Object No. 36912 would make its closest approach in about four hours. I had them repeat the information to make sure I was doing the math right, he recalled. Never before had the I.S.S. faced such a high probability of collision on such short notice. Moving the station was out of the question.

Instantly, he relayed the news to Houstons flight director, Ed Van Cise, and then rushed to Mission Control, where he joined a tense meeting to discuss the options. There was only one: instruct the crew to lock down the stationclosing hatches between modulesand then shelter in the Soyuz capsule, a Russian vessel that can serve as a lifeboat. There were three people aboard the I.S.S.: one American, Scott Kelly, and two Russians, Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko. In the Soyuz, they could detach from the failing structure and return to Earth. In the stations history, its crew had sheltered in the Soyuz only three other times.

Van Cise reached out to Kelly, who was exercising on a treadmill mounted on one of the stations walls. Houston on Space to Ground Two, a voice barked, announcing the call. We are privatizing. This meant that the feed from Mission Control, which usually could be accessed freely by the ground crew, would be nonpublic. Kelly later wrote in an expedition log that his first thought was, Oh, fuck. In space, unscheduled private conversations portend bad news: in 2011, on an earlier mission, Houston had privatized the channel to inform him that his sister-in-law, the Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, had been shot.

Hearing that the call was for NASA business, he was at first relieved. Then the enormity of the situation sank in. Fuck, he thought again. The privatized call was a courtesy, so that Kelly would be prepared once the alert was relayed publicly. The space station operates on Greenwich Mean Time; for the crew, the moment that Object No. 36912 either slammed into the structure or zoomed past it would be 12:01. Mission Control instructed Kelly to start closing hatches at 10:30 A.M., then retreat with the Russians to the Soyuz at 11:51, and stay there until notified. Kelly cut short his workout.

At ten oclock, Mission Control contacted Kelly again, to remind him that he and Kornienko had an interview scheduled with morning news programs in Florida and Kentucky. NASA reasoned that there was time to proceed: the interview would take less than twenty minutes, and lockdown was in half an hour. Seriously? Kelly wrote in his log. We have a satellite coming at us. But he and Kornienko got into their positions without protest. We are ready for the event, Kelly said, dryly, and glanced at his watch. Then he answered questions about the Kentucky Derby, performed zero-gravity stunts, and tried not to show that he was in a life-threatening situation.

As soon as the transmissions ended, Kelly began locking down hatches throughout the American modules. Calmly, he floated through the structurethe lab, the cupola, an air lockwith a flashlight in his mouth, to augment the stations dim lighting. He had asked Houston if the debris hurtling toward the space station would be visible; as he closed the hatches, he got a response. It will be in orbital night, Houston told him. So, no viewing opportunity.

How about relative velocity? Kelly asked.

Fourteen kilometres per second.

Copy, Kelly said, plainly, but the number was terrifying: the debris and the station were closing in on each other at a combined speed of thirty-one thousand miles an hour. In orbit, a one-centimetre bolt can have the explosive force of a hand grenade upon impact. Object No. 36912 was at least ten times larger. When the space stations shielding was being designed, a NASA astrophysicist named Donald Kessler had asked experts to shoot small objects at metal film cannisters at hypervelocities. The ballistics revealed that, even if debris penetrated the I.S.S. cleanly, it could leave a mangled hole upon exit. Object No. 36912 risked triggering a chain of failures that could destroy the entire structure.

Kelly focussed on procedure. Houston had told him to pick up a scientific instrument and a medical kit. He got those, and also some personal items, thinking of an American astronaut,Mike Foale, who had served on the Mir space station, in 1997. Foale had been living in a module called Spektr when a supply ship came in too quicklylike a shark, a cosmonaut onboard recalled, this black body covered in spots sliding pastand then smashed into it. To contain the breach, Spektr was sealed, forever separating Foale from his things, including gold pendants he intended to give his wife and children. You always think about what happened to him when youre closing a hatch with important stuff on the other side, Kelly told me.

After locking down the American modules, Kelly caught up with Kornienko and Padalka in the Russian section. Padalka, the commander of the I.S.S., strove to project confidence; when Moscow Mission Control had asked him about the mood onboard, he responded, Fighting spirit! Kelly noticed that none of the hatches on the five Russian modules were shut. (Padalka and Kornienko say that they remember this differently.) The Russians dont close their hatches like we do, Kelly wrote in his log. They think its a waste of timebasically thinking the two most likely scenarios are the thing misses, or catastrophic destruction. The stuff in-between is way too unlikely to care about.

Kelly was amazed to find the cosmonauts having lunch. We wanted to eat! Kornienko told me. Russians have a proverb, War is war, but lunch runs on time. The Soyuzs food supply was limited to three days, and who knew how long they might be stranded there? There were fourteen minutes to spare, so Kelly joined them for a can of Appetizing Appetizera dish that, he later recalled, resembled cat food, in appearance, consistency, and probably a little bit in taste.

In Houston, the crew at Mission Control waited tensely. A wall-size screen contained a depiction of the space stations orbit and a live feed of its interior. Ed Van Cise fidgeted with a computer mouse. One NASA official stared at a monitor with a hand over his mouth. Another sat with an emergency manual open; he told me, We know what to do, but we dont know what the outcome is going to be. This could be terrible, this could be a loss of life.

At 11:51, the three men in the space station climbed into the Soyuz capsule, a cramped vessel that looked like a pinched cylinder atop the station. It was packed with switches and knobs. Its dark outside, so its darker than normal inside, Kelly wrote in his log. Its cold. He was wearing a black NASA sweatshirt, and he had pulled the hood down nearly over his eyes.

The men were instructed to leave the Soyuz hatch sealed, but unlatchedin case the debris hit the capsule rather than the I.S.S. and they needed to rush back in. Kornienko focussed on the latch, imagining the steps he would take in a crisis. There were no wordssilence, he told me. Kelly, too, was struck by the sudden quiet, as each man retreated into his thoughts. He wrote in his log, I can only hear the sounds of the fans inside the Soyuz, my breathing.

With the tension growing, Padalka said, You know, it will really suck if we get hit.

Da, Kornienko said. Will suck.

A monitor indicated the time, and the men watched the minutes elapse, bracing for 12:01. Kelly noticed Kornienko gazing out a porthole. Finally, I said, Misha, youre not going to see anything, he recalled. That thing is going thirty thousand miles an hour, and its dark outside! Then I noticed that I was looking out the window, and listening, and tensing out, and then at some point you realize, We wouldnt even fucking know if we got hit. We just wouldve been vaporized!

The three men fell into silence again. For a while, Kelly listened to his iPod. As the time approached twelve noon and some odd number of seconds I started to grimace, Kelly wrote. Thirty seconds go by. A minute. At 12:01, nothing happened. Padalka got on the radio. Moscow, he said. Do you read?

Loud and clear. How are things?

Were getting into 12:02, Padalka said. Everything is very quiet up here. After nearly three tense minutes of radio silence, Padalka called in again: Moscow, do we keep waiting?

The radio crackled. Thats all, it finally said. Object No. 36912 had blown past the station. Later, the Air Force put its distance at less than a mile and a halfa gap it could have closed faster than the blink of an eye. Three weeks later, it incinerated in the atmosphere.

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The Elusive Peril of Space Junk - The New Yorker

Look up: Here are the best times to spot the International Space Station this week – The Cincinnati Enquirer

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The International Space Station will be visible in the Cincinnati sky for over 30 minutes between now and Tuesday, according to NASA's "Spot The Station" tracker.

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The International Space Station will be visible in the Cincinnati sky for over 30 minutes between now and Tuesday, according to NASA's "Spot The Station" tracker.

The station passes over Cincinnati frequently, but oftentimes is visible for only about one minute at a time, and sometimes less than that.

But NASA's tracker cites a total of 32 minutes of station visibility spread over the next six days.

You don't need anything more than your arm and fist todetermine where to look in the night sky.The horizon is considered zerodegrees, and directly overhead is 90 degrees. According to NASA, if you hold your fist at arm's length resting on the horizon, the top of your fist will be at about 10 degrees.

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Look up: Here are the best times to spot the International Space Station this week - The Cincinnati Enquirer

Ellen Ochoa Shakes Hands with First Humanoid Robot to Head to International Space Station – SpaceCoastDaily.com

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first humanoid robot to travel to spaceThen-NASA Johnson Space Center deputy director Ellen Ochoa poses for a photo with Robonaut 2 (R2) during media day in the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility on Aug. 4, 2010.

(NASA) Then-NASA Johnson Space Center deputy director Ellen Ochoa poses for a photo with Robonaut 2 (R2) during media day in the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility on Aug. 4, 2010.

R2 hitched a ride to the International Space Station with the STS-133.

It was the first humanoid robot to travel to space and the first U.S.-built robot to visit the station. R2 will stay on the space station indefinitely to allow engineers on the ground to learn more about how humanoid robots fare in microgravity.

Ochoa became Johnson Center director in 2012 and retired from that position in 2018. She is veteran of four space shuttle flights and holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford.

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Made In Space is sending the first ceramic manufacturing facility in space to the ISS next week – TechCrunch

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In-space manufacturing company Made In Space is pushing the envelope on what can, well, be made in space with its next mission which is set to launch aboard a Northrop Grumman International Space Station (ISS) resupply mission set for next Tuesday. Aboard that launch will be Made In Spaces Turbine Ceramic Manufacturing Module (aka CMM), a commercial ceramic turbine blisk manufacturing device that uses 3D printing technology to produce detailed parts that require a high degree of production accuracy.

A turbine blisk is a combo rotor disk/blade array that is used primarily in engines used in the aerospace industry. Making them involves using additive manufacturing to craft them as a single component, and the purpose of this mission is to provide a proof-of-concept about the viability of doing that in a microgravity environment. Gravity can actually introduce defects into ceramic blisks manufactured on Earth, because of the way that material can settle, leading to sedimentation, for instance. Producing them in microgravity could mean lower error rates overall, and a higher possible degree of precision for making finely detailed designs.

Made In Space, which was acquired earlier this year by new commercial space supply parent company Redwire, has been at the forefront of creating and deploying 3D printing technologies in space, particularly through its partnership with the International Space Station. The goal of the company is to demonstrate the commercial benefits of in-space manufacturing, and to commercialize the technology in order to create tangible benefits for a number of industries right here on Earth.

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Why Washington and Baltimore are different colors from space – Greater Greater Washington

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A view of the Washington (left) and Baltimore (right) regions from space. by NASA / International Space Station Expedition 63 Crew licensed under Creative Commons.

On July 15, the crew of the International Space Station posted a nighttime photo of our region from space on Twitter, likening Washington and Baltimore to two galaxies swirling near each other. This photo gives us the opportunity to make a number of observations about the region.

DC and Baltimore City are different colors at night

The first thing that stands out when one looks at the ISS crews photo nighttime lighting in our region is that the Washington region looks orange while the Baltimore region looks white. If they actually were galaxies, this would imply that Washington was significantly older and made up of mature stars fusing helium instead of hydrogen, or else that it was significantly further away and retreating at a high velocity. What is actually going on, however, is something more mundane: a difference in the Districts and Baltimore Citys street lighting choices.

Baltimore recently completed a program, called Bmore Bright, to replace all of the citys street lights with modern LED street lights, which are more energy efficient and have longer lifespans than the various types of high-energy discharge lamps that have historically been used for street lighting.

While the District is currently in the planning phases of a similar project, only 5% of the street lights in DC are currently LEDs, while 86% are high-pressure sodium high-energy discharge lamps. While LED street lights are designed to replicate the color distribution of sunlight, and so appear white, high-pressure sodium lamps have a distinctly orange glow, giving the District its orange appearance in the photo.

The Districts consistent use of high-pressure sodium lamps also helps the DC-Maryland border stand out fairly clearly in the map: the close-in Maryland suburbs are lit with a variety of types of street lights, unlike the Districts consistent orange glow. Likewise, in Baltimore, the Seagirt Marine Terminal and Mid-Atlantic Terminal port facilities stand out because their orange sodium-lamp illumination contrasts sharply with the citys white LED streetlights.

The Sparrows Point warehouse facilities facilities, on the bay side of the Baltimore Beltway Francis Scott Key Bridge, on the other hand, glow blue-white, suggesting that they are illuminated with LED, metal-halide, or mercury-vapor lamps.

A view of Chicago from space, taken 5 August 2016. by NASA / International Space Station Expedition 47 Crew licensed under Creative Commons.

This visualization of borders from street light colors is possible elsewhere in the county as well. In the photo above, the borders of the city of Chicago are clearly visible because Chicago also used orange sodium-vapor street lights when the photo was taken in 2016, while its suburbs did not.

Baltimore and Washington arent twin cities the way Dallas-Ft. Worth are

In the Twitter thread where the photo was originally posted, several people commented on Washington and Baltimore being twin cities or made comparisons to Dallas-Fort Worth. However, while the Washington and Baltimore suburbs do somewhat blend together with lines of continuous development in the US-1/I-95 and to a lesser degree Baltimore-Washington Parkway corridors, they are still visually very distinct in the view from space.

In comparison, Dallas and Fort Worth with downtown cores 30 miles apart, not much less than the 35 miles that separate downtown Baltimore from downtown DC really do blur together into one continuous area of development when viewed from space, as in the photo below.

While downtown Dallas is identifiable as the bright core in the lower right of the image and downtown Fort Worth is visible as a smaller bright core in the lower left, with the commercial core of Arlington, Texas in between them, it is hard to identify a clear boundary between what is Dallas and what is Fort Worth, and the only dark areas are several lakes and the parkland along the Trinity River, which connects the two cities.

A view of Dallas-Fort Worth from space, taken 3 January 2020. by NASA / International Space Station Expedition 61 Crew licensed under Creative Commons.

To help give a clearer view of the relative scales of our region and several of the USs largest metropolitan regions, I created an image showing the views of Baltimore-Washington, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, and New York from space, all at the same scale and with all images rotated with north at the top.

In this image, we can see that the Dallas-Fort Worth region, which has roughly the same population as the Baltimore-Washington region, is also similar in size to our region, but with much more consistent density across a continuous area, while the density in our region is concentrated in the cores of the District and Baltimore, along with a few linear suburban corridors.

Clockwise from upper left, Baltimore-Washington, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York, and Los Angeles from space at the same scale. by the author.

New York, on the other hand, can fit its densest areas New York City, Newark, Hudson County in New Jersey, and southern Westchester and eastern Nassau Counties in New York in the space between the District and Baltimore, even though those areas combined have a significantly larger population than our region.

Meanwhile, the core regions of the Los Angeles metro area the Los Angeles basin proper, the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys, and the northern portion of Orange County with a smaller population than the core portion of the New York metro area, sprawl out over a significantly larger region.

The structure of the Baltimore-Washington region from space

This photo of our region gives a good view of the general structure of development especially commercial development, which is generally more brightly-lit and where street lighting is less obscured by trees in our region. While a number of well-lit suburban corridors extend from Baltimore, none are as prominent as the Rockville Pike/I-270 corridor that extends almost directly from the District to the top of the photo.

A view of the Washington (left) and Baltimore (right) regions from space, taken 15 September 2020. by NASA / International Space Station Expedition 63 Crew licensed under Creative Commons.

Other notably long corridors that extend outward from Washington include the Branch Avenue corridor to Waldorf visible in the lower left of the image and the Richmond Highway and the Beltway corridors in Fairfax County at the center left.

The Dulles Toll Road, which extends from the bright cluster of Tysons through Reston to an orange blotch that appears to be Dulles International Airport at the upper-left of the image is somewhat less identifiable, in part because the low-density development in the Difficult Run watershed produces a gap in illumination between Tysons and Reston.

The only traditional urban core besides Baltimore and Washington visible in the image is Annapolis, in the lower center: Frederick, which is at the northern end of the I-270 corridor, is just beyond the top edge of the image near the center. While the I-270 corridor from Washington to Frederick is very visible and the Governor Ritchie Highway corridor between Baltimore and Annapolis can be made out, the I-70/US Route 40 corridor between Baltimore and Frederick, like the US Route 50 corridor between Washington and Annapolis, goes through largely undeveloped areas and is not visible.

Interestingly, several different visible corridors link Baltimore and Washington. To the south, the Robert Crain Highway corridor through Gambrills and Crofton links the southern suburbs of Baltimore to Bowie and Upper Marlboro in Washingtons eastern surburbs. North of this is a very dark patch, consisting of the research farmland of the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center and the forests of the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge.

The main connection between Baltimore and Washington, however, consists of four closely-spaced and roughly parallel roads: from north to south Columbia Pike, the Beltway, US Route 1, and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway link the two metro areas. Of these four, only two are clearly visible in the image. Columbia Pike can be made out as a series of patches of light that appear to correspond to development at White Oak, Briggs-Chaney, and Burtonsville in Montgomery County and Scaggsville, Columbia, and Ellicott City in Howard County. The US Route 1 corridor is more consistently illuminated between Baltimore and Washington, with a downward-pointing corridor of light along Laurel-Fort Meade Road connecting it to the orange patch of sodium vapor lamps at Fort Meade.

A close-up view of Washington

A close-up view of the District and its inner suburbs shows DC as four concentric rings with different lighting patterns. At the very center, the National Mall and the undeveloped land around the White House form a dark corridor shaped like an inverted letter T.

They are surrounded, however, by the brightest (and least orange) part of the District: the commercial core of Downtown, Capitol Hill, Foggy Bottom, and the Federal offices in Southwest near LEnfant Plaza. This, in turn, is surrounded by a shell of less-brightly lit residential areas, roughly corresponding to the boundaries of the LEnfant City but stretching almost to Silver Spring along 16th Street and Georgia Avenue.

Finally, the residential areas west of Rock Creek Park, the residential and industrial areas in Northeast, and the residential areas east of the Anacostia make up a fourth, even less-well-illuminated shell.

A close-up of DC and its inner suburbs from space. by Close-up of a portion of an image taken by NASA / International Space Station Expedition 63 Crew licensed under Creative Commons.

While the suburbs are less-consistently illuminated, a number of bright cores are recognizable within them, connected by well-lit arterial roads. In Montgomery County, Bethesda, White Flint, and the Montgomery Mall area all stand out north of the very-recognizable Wisconsin and Connecticut Avenue corridors in the District, while downtown Silver Spring is probably Montgomery Countys single brightest cluster.

In Prince Georges County, on the other hand, roughly continuous commercial development along the Beltway is fairly visible (in Montgomery County, much of the Beltway runs through parkland), but the Baltimore Avenue corridor through College Park, the University of Maryland, and Beltsville is quite visible, as is University Boulevard from the University of Maryland to Langley Park. Further south, development along US-50, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Branch Avenue stand out, as does National Harbor.

In Northern Virginia, Tysons (near the top left of the image, with Dunn Loring-Merrifield just south/left of it) is, unsurprisingly, the regions brightest suburban cluster. Development along Richmond Highway, starting with Crystal City and continuing past National Airport and Alexandria to the Richmond Highway corridor in Fairfax County is also quite prominent. The route of the Beltway, with Virginia Route 7 and Duke Street/Little River Turnpike within it is also quite recognizable, as is, to a lesser degree, development along I-395.

A close-up view of Baltimore

A close-up view of Baltimore at the same scale shows a smaller brightly-illuminated core and a spiderweb-like network of bright development along radial roads. The brightest of these, running toward the upper-right corner of the photo, is the Towson-Timonium-Lutherville corridor along York Road and I-83 in Baltimore County north of the city.

A close-up of Baltimore and its inner suburbs from space. by Close-up of a portion of an image taken by NASA / International Space Station Expedition 63 Crew licensed under Creative Commons.

A number of major corridors run northeast, toward the right side of the image, but the brightest area is the White Marsh area along the I-95/US-40 corridor. At the top of the photo, two bright corridors are visible: the brighter is the Reisterstown Road and I-795 corridor while the dimmer is the Liberty Road corridor. The lower-left of the photo, in the direction towards Washington, has less visible radial orientation, perhaps because radial roads in this area have to cross parkland and the valleys of Gwynn Falls and the Patapsco River. The bright orange blotch in this area appears to be development around Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

What else do you see?

Do you see other interesting features of our region in these images? Please let us know in the comments!

DWRowlands is a human geography grad student and Prince Georges County native, currently living in College Park. More of their writing on transportation-related and other topics can be found on theirwebsite.They also write on DC transportation and demographic issues for theDC Policy Center, where they are a Fellow. In their spare time, they volunteer for Prince Georges Advocates for Community-Based Transit.However, the views expressed here are their own.

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Why Washington and Baltimore are different colors from space - Greater Greater Washington

Western Australia space tracking station to cut ties with China – The Guardian

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China will lose access to a strategic space tracking station in Western Australia when its contract expires, the facilitys owners said, a decision that cuts into Beijings expanding space exploration and navigational capabilities in the Pacific region.

The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) has had a contract allowing Beijing access to the satellite antenna at the ground station since at least 2011. It is located next to an SSC satellite station primarily used by the United States and its agencies, including Nasa.

The Swedish state-owned company told Reuters it would not enter into any new contracts at the Australian site to support Chinese customers after its current contract expires. However, it did not disclose when the lease runs out.

Given the complexity of the Chinese market, brought about by the overall geopolitical situation, SSC has decided to focus mainly on other markets for the coming years, the SSC said in an emailed response to questions.

The site is owned by SSC subsidiary, SSC Space Australia.

The Australian government did not immediately respond to questions on Monday.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The expansion of Chinas space capabilities, which includes the growing sophistication of its Beidou navigation network, is one of the new frontiers of tension between the US and China, who are clashing on everything from technology and trade to Chinese activities in the disputed South China Sea.

Australia has a strong alliance with the United States, which includes working together on space research and programs, while Canberras diplomatic and trade ties with Beijing have also been fracturing.

China last used the Yatharagga Satellite Station, located about 350 km (250 miles) north of the Australian city of Perth, in June 2013 to support the three-person Shenzhou 10 mission which completed a series of space docking tests, SSC said.

The SSC said the current contract supports Chinese scientific space missions within its program for manned-space flights for telemetry, tracking and command services.

Ground stations are a vital part of space programs given they create a telecommunications link with spacecraft. While stations have different capabilities, they can be equipped to co-ordinate satellites for civil-military Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as Beidou, Russias GLONASS, the European Unions Galileo system and US-owned GPS.

Chinas space program has been increasing its access to overseas ground stations in recent years in line with the expansion of its space exploration and navigational programs.

Generally speaking anywhere you put a GNSS monitoring ground station will improve the accuracy of positioning for that region, said Joon Wayn Cheong, a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales School of Electrical Engineering.

Christopher Newman, professor of Space Law and Policy at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, said China wants to remove its dependence on GPS as part of broader plans to expand its global influence.

GPS could be made unavailable to them in a military conflict. An independent secure system is crucial for the capabilities of the Peoples Liberation Army in respect to targeting, weapons, navigation, Newman told Reuters.

Beijing last year re-established diplomatic ties with the small Pacific island nation of Kiribati, where it has a mothballed ground station in the central Pacific Ocean

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Western Australia space tracking station to cut ties with China - The Guardian

Why now is the most exciting time in space in 50 years – Fast Company

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The essential parts of an economy are intertwined by their very nature. Theres no point in having a food market if there are no farmers to supply food. But theres no point in growing food until there are markets where you can sell it. And what is the right moment to go into the food transportation business, carting the freshly harvested produce from the field to the store? Weve seen this in our own era: What was the point in creating high-speed internet service if there was no content online that required such speeds? Why bother creating YouTube if no one has the bandwidth to watch and upload videos easily?

This is exactly the moment were in with human space travel. Why bother creating the technology to launch people into space when theres nowhere in particular to go? But why create destinations in space when theres no affordable way to get to them?

Yet its precisely because of this moment that now is the most exciting time in space in 50 yearsstretching back to the moment when we were landing on the Moon.

What does it cost to put a single person into orbit? The Russians have been charging NASA $80 million, or more, to send a single U.S. astronaut to the space station, since we sent our space shuttles to museums. No company can afford to spend $80 million to send a single person to space. Theres no work to be done in spaceno way to make money that would justify that. But what if you could send a person to space for $1 million? $250,000? $100,000? Companies spend that kind of money all the time to move staff around the world, and to equip them for research, for manufacturing, for production. Thats also a 99% reduction in the price of launching a person.

Thats the price Elon Musks SpaceX and Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin are aiming fornot immediately, but in the next decade.

Where will SpaceX and Blue Origin be delivering space travelers? The space station is fully staffed with six people, three on the Russian side, three on the American side. Robert Bigelow is ready to solve that problem. He has been for years. Bigelow is a Las Vegas real-estate and low-cost-hotel entrepreneur, and although he has no formal space or engineering training, he became obsessed with the idea of providing in space what he has provided on Earth: living and working space for rent.

In 1999, he founded Bigelow Aerospace and licensed out a nascent technology from NASA itself: Space habitats that are made of superstrong high-tech fabrics that can be launched folded up and then expanded to full size once in space. What so captivated Bigelow was a simple idea: With hard-sided space moduleslike those used to make the International Space Stationyou can never have a space that is bigger across than the rocket that launched it. That has given space stations a cramped air, from Skylab onward. The modules of the space station are 14 feet in diameter, which quickly gets tighter when you start mounting equipment racks on the walls.

The advantages of expandable space habitats are dramatic. The design of Bigelows basic orbiting space modulethe company calls it the B330is 22 feet across, but compressed for launch, it fits easily on existing rockets. The pressurized volume of the entire space station, after 19 years of assembly, is 915 cubic meters. It took 41 space shuttle flights to put the hardware into orbit to assemble it. Three Bigelow B330seach one 330 cubic meters insidewould get you 990 cubic feet of working space.

Three launches to a space bigger than the ISS.

Bigelow has a factory in Las Vegas with 365,000 square feet of manufacturing space ready to make B330s. Bigelowwho has put his operations on hold during the pandemichas been waiting (impatiently) for his fellow entrepreneurs, Musk and Bezos, to get their transportation system goinghes ready to provide spec real estate to NASA, to some nation that wants its own space station (Japan? Israel? France?), to a pharmaceutical or technology company that wants to figure out zero-gravity manufacturing, to a hospitality company that wants to offer an orbital hotel. Transportation hub, laboratory, observatory, resortthats the beauty of the B330. Bigelow will build to suit.

Although space tourism gets a lot of media attention, a robust human space economy will be built on doing things in space that cant be done practically on Earth but that benefit life on Earth. One of the earliest tests of manufacturing in space, for instance, involves a California company called Made in Space making a kind of optical fiber, in a self-contained module on the space station, that can be made in microgravity with a purity thats not possible on Earth. The space-made fiber could increase the speed of data transmission back on Earth by many timesand its exactly the kind of lightweight, high-value product that could make sense to manufacture in orbit and then transport back to Earth.

What will sustain interest and innovation in space isnt a government program or even a half-dozen government programs. What will sustain interest and vibrancy in space is a real, self-sustaining space economy. I believe that we are sitting on the edge of a golden age of space exploration. Right on the edge, says Bezos. The thing that I would be most proud of, when Im 80 years old, is if Blue Origin can lower the cost of access to space by such a large amount that there can be a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in spacejust as weve seen over the last 20 years on the internet.

Bezos has said he expects to refine Blue Origins ultimate operations enough that there will be regularly scheduled launches twice a weekthe Monday and Thursday Blue Origin flights to orbit. That would give Blue alone 100 launches a year. In the five years from 2014 through 2019, the entire world averaged 95 launches a yearincluding both satellite and crewed launches.

Theres nowhere near the demand right now for a single company to double the launch capacity of the worldbut thats at the current prices. Who knows what people will imagine doing, who knows what people will be able to do, when the price comes down 90%, or 99%?

Thats why this is the most exciting moment in space travel in 50 years. Because for the first time its really possible to imagine that space travel will begin to be mastered in the way that, for instance, passenger jet travel has been. Theres nothing easy about sending a jet with 250 people on it from New York City to London, but for a passenger paying $300 for the trip, all the challenging parts, all the complexity, all the elaborate supporting infrastructure, is invisible. For the first time ever, if you want to go to space, ten years from now, its quite likely youll be able to.

Its the most exciting moment in space travel in 50 years because if you want to help create this new space age, you can join up right now and do it. Creating the space infrastructurelike creating the interstate highway system, or the air traffic control system, or the internetwill take thousands and thousands of people, and those will be good jobs, demanding, challenging, gratifying.

Imagine being given the chance to work with Henry Ford on the Model T in the 1910s. Or to join Google as it was getting started in 2000. Thats the moment were in with space right now.

This is an excerpt from One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon, the New York Times best-selling book by Fast Company contributor Charles Fishman. The book comes out in paperback today, with an all-new concluding chapter titled, The Most Exciting Time in Space in 50 Years, from which this is excerpted. Last summer, Fishman wrote 50 stories for Fast Company about what it took to get us to the Moon in the 1960s, collected here.

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Why now is the most exciting time in space in 50 years - Fast Company

Elon Musk’s million-mile battery: What it really means – Los Angeles Times

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Perhaps youve heard about the million-mile battery the latest buzz phrase electric vehicle proponents hope will energize public interest in buying EVs.

If you havent, Elon Musk will make sure you do on Tuesday, when Tesla goes online for what its calling Battery Day. Musk is expected to detail a million-mile battery project along with, he teased on Twitter, other exciting things.

Musks teasers dont always pan out. (Update: At the event, Musk undershot expectations, announcing what amounts to a pilot project he suggested could reach volume production by 2030. Theres still a lot of work to do, he said. Were not saying this is completely in the bag.)

But the idea of a million-mile battery offers real promise.

[I]t would eliminate one of the big negatives associated with electric vehicles, said Donald Sadoway, a materials chemist and battery expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: the car owners fear that the battery will die and require costly replacement.

But because the battery industry is loaded with start-ups and inventors promoting their wares, often before theyre ready for prime time, Sadoway suggests some skepticism is in order.

A million-mile battery does not mean you can drive a million miles between recharges. It means a battery that will last for 1 million miles or more before it cant hold a charge strong enough to power an electric car anymore. Regular recharges every few hundred miles would still be needed to keep a car or truck powered.

Todays batteries face limits on the number of times they can be recharged. Right now, most car batteries are rated to handle about 1,000 full charges total. Manufacturer warranties on car batteries top out at about eight years and 150,000 miles which is proving conservative, as car batteries in general are outlasting their warranties. A battery that lasts 1 million miles could handle 4,000 full recharges or more.

Musk could extend the warranty to 15 years. You think hell do that?

Vince Battaglia, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

No car is likely to last 1 million miles. It would fall apart long before that. But its possible to design cars so that batteries can be swapped in and out. Individual car owners, theoretically, could keep their batteries and install them into new car bodies. A long-lasting battery could increase a cars resale value.

Perhaps more important, swappable batteries could power long-haul trucks, city buses and driverless robotaxis, all of which log many miles a day, every day. The same batteries could also pump energy into the electric grid when the vehicles not being used, with less worry about battery life degradation.

For those applications, this would totally change the game, said Shirley Meng, professor of nano-engineering and materials at UC San Diego.

Tesla, which has aspirations to build electric semi trucks and deploy fleets of robotaxis while attempting to build a grid energy battery storage business, plans to begin manufacturing batteries itself. It currently buys batteries from Panasonic and LG Chem.

Maybe. Chinas battery manufacturing giant, Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL), said in June it is ready to produce a battery that will last 16 years and 1.2 million miles but hasnt said much more about it.

The battery would cost 10% more than the typical battery CATL sells now, company Chairman Zeng Yuqun told Bloomberg in June. No detail has been provided on the batterys inner workings, its weight, range, energy or power, and no carmaker has yet announced an interest in buying it.

No battery maker beyond CATL has made a million-mile claim. If Musk announces hes ready to produce one, it would raise eyebrows throughout the industry.

Battery Day certainly creates some buzz, Sadoway said. But remarkable claims require remarkable proof.

Its not clear yet that it has one. A research paper released last September by Tesla-funded scientists at Canadas Dalhousie University reported theyd created a million-mile battery in the lab. The team was led by Jeff Dahn, a major figure in lithium-ion battery research who began working with Tesla in 2016.

The three-year project showed that by using specific combinations of cathode and electrolyte materials, charge-recharge limits could be pushed from about 1,000 cycles up to 4,000 cycles, a major step toward longer-lasting car batteries.

A big question for Musk on Battery Day is whether his manufacturing plans are getting ahead of the science. Some leading battery experts express scientific skepticism. Its one thing to show results in a lab, quite another to develop manufacturing lines and turn out large volumes at a profit.

Dahn is very famous, hes very good, hes committed to his work, said Vince Battaglia, who heads the Battery Storage Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This is interesting. Who knew you could do so many cycles?

Yet he calls some of the methods and findings different from my own.

Battaglia noted the batteries Dahns lab tested were far smaller than the cells that would be used in electric vehicles. I dont know whats going to happen when you make those bigger cells and the temperature gets a little hotter inside. Youll maybe get back to an eight-to-10-year life, Battaglia said. Dahn said he stands by his findings.

The website Electrek, which sometimes gets advance looks at Teslas plans, last week published pictures of unusually large battery cylinders it said Musk might introduce. The cells in Teslas current cars look like slightly larger AA batteries. These look like junior-size beer cans.

Perhaps Tesla will reveal convincing data to show those cells can boost energy density and cost efficiency to reach a million-mile cycle life, Battaglia said but its a tall order.

The big question here is how its going to increase cost, said MITs Sadoway.

The battery price I think will go up, because dollars per kilowatt-hour will go up, Battaglia said. Maybe Tesla buyers will spend extra on a battery that will last longer.

Meng, of UC San Diego, said such a battery could be considered an asset for the car buyer. If the battery can be swapped into other vehicles and last 1 million miles, it will retain a certain value, said Meng, who drives a Tesla herself. How much that might be is unknown. It will take some economists looking into this to show how the equations will be changed, she said.

Musk created a new and significant market for electric cars. His SpaceX sends rockets into outer space and lands them on barges. He has pushed the envelope with driver-assist technologies. He has accomplished much.

Yet his promises in recent years have far outreached performance. A semi truck unveiled in 2017 has yet to be produced. He predicted 1 million driverless robotaxis by the end of this year; so far, Tesla is on pace for zero. (The company doesnt make self-driving cars, never mind 1 million robotaxis.)

A solar roof project announced with a nonfunctional prototype in 2016 remains an experiment. Grand plans to solve traffic problems with underground tunnels have amounted to a single tourist attraction in Las Vegas.

Musk has overpromised and underdelivered on battery technologies too. In 2013, he put on a show to demonstrate a plan to build a network of stations to swap batteries for Tesla owners and relieve range anxiety. Only a single station was built. Little used, it was dismantled, but not before the California Air Resources Board gave Tesla extra emissions credits for the effort, which it later sold at a profit.

Musk has set a high bar for himself on Tuesday. In a conference call with stock analysts in 2017, asked about a Toyota solid-state battery project, he said this:

You know, I could give you a PowerPoint presentation about teleportation to the Andromeda Galaxy. That doesnt mean it works, he said. When somebody has like some great claim that theyve got this awesome battery, you know what, send us a sample. Or if you dont trust us, send it to an independent lab, where the parameters can be verified. Otherwise, [shut up].

Lawrence Berkeleys Battaglia said Musk could silence the critics with one simple statement. Teslas battery warranty is good for eight years and 150,000 miles. Musk could extend the warranty to 15 years, Battaglia said. You think hell do that?

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Elon Musk's million-mile battery: What it really means - Los Angeles Times