Trump’s Travel Ban Deters Tourists and Their Dollars From All Over the World – NBCNews.com

Many travelers with plans to head to or from the United States for business or leisure are reassessing or even canceling their trips in response to President Donald Trump's immigration policies, travel experts say.

After Trump's inauguration and the first executive order temporarily banning travel to the U.S. from certain countries, travel analysts at Forward Keys and airfare search site Hopper saw flight bookings and searches to the U.S. slip.

"International trends in bookings to the U.S. are down 6.5 percent compared with the equivalent period the year before," Forward Keys noted. "Trump's travel ban is putting off people traveling to the U.S. from many regions of the world, beyond the Middle East."

And while demand has recovered slightly since the initial travel ban was overturned, "It is still well below expected levels," said Hopper data analyst Patrick Surry in an analysis of the travel ban's impact on international travel.

On Tuesday, Hopper analyzed flight search demand from international origins to the U.S. for the three weeks prior to Trump's inauguration through March 6th and found overall searches down about 10 percent compared to the same period last year, with 102 of 122 origin countries showing declines.

And while the new travel ban is encouraging for those looking to come to the U.S. from Iraq, the question remains as to whether the revised order "did enough to mollify the prospective traveler from Canada, Europe, or elsewhere around the world who may have been put off by the initial travel ban," said U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow.

"It doesn't appear that the administration fully seized the opportunity to differentiate between the potential security risks targeted by [Trump's latest immigration] order and the legitimate business and leisure visitors from abroad who support 15.1 million American jobs," said Dow.

For now, the members of ASTA, the American Society of Travel Agents, are waiting, watching and fielding calls from anxious clients.

After the first travel rollout, some ASTA members reported no disruptions while others reported significant canceled or delayed plans, said ASTA spokeswoman Erika Richter.

"It's too soon to tell if this new travel ban will have an immediate impact," she told NBC News. "But it's also important to remember that any disruption to the travel ecosystem has a negative impact on the travel economy in one way or another."

And that negative impact can add up.

International travelers spent an average of $4,400 per person, per trip, noted Laura Mandala, CEO of Mandala Research. "It is well documented that a decline in U.S. global favorability ratings has corresponded to a decline in visitation to the U.S.," she said.

For example, during the Bush years, international visitation declined by 20 percent, said Mandala.

And while the United States does have Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, and other one-of-a-kind attractions, there are plenty of places outside the United States where international travelers can easily spend their dollars.

"We know international travelers vote with their passports," said Mandala. "Perceptions of hassles on visas or security have historically been responsible for travelers choosing destinations where they won't encounter these issues."

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Trump's Travel Ban Deters Tourists and Their Dollars From All Over the World - NBCNews.com

Titan Supercomputer Assists With Polymer Nanocomposites Study – HPCwire (blog)

OAK RIDGE, Tenn.,March 8 Polymer nanocomposites mix particles billionths of a meter (nanometers, nm) in diameter with polymers, which are long molecular chains. Often used to make injection-molded products, they are common in automobiles, fire retardants, packaging materials, drug-delivery systems, medical devices, coatings, adhesives, sensors, membranes and consumer goods. When a team led by the Department of Energys Oak Ridge National Laboratory tried to verify that shrinking the nanoparticle size would adversely affect the mechanical properties of polymer nanocomposites, they got a big surprise.

We found an unexpectedly large effect of small nanoparticles, said Shiwang Cheng of ORNL. The team of scientists at ORNL, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK)reportedtheir findings in the journalACS Nano.

Blending nanoparticles and polymers enables dramatic improvements in the properties of polymer materials. Nanoparticle size, spatial organization and interactions with polymer chains are critical in determining behavior of composites. Understanding these effects will allow for the improved design of new composite polymers, as scientists can tune mechanical, chemical, electrical, optical and thermal properties.

Until recently, scientists believed an optimal nanoparticle size must exist. Decreasing the size would be good only to a point, as the smallest particles tend to plasticize at low loadings and aggregate at high loadings, both of which harm macroscopic properties of polymer nanocomposites.

The ORNL-led study compared polymer nanocomposites containing particles 1.8 nm in diameter and those with particles 25 nm in diameter. Most conventional polymer nanocomposites contain particles 1050 nm in diameter.Tomorrow, novel polymer nanocomposites may contain nanoparticles far less than 10 nm in diameter, enabling new properties not achievable with larger nanoparticles.

Well-dispersed small sticky nanoparticles improved properties, one of which broke records: Raising the materials temperature less than 10 degrees Celsius caused a fast, million-fold drop in viscosity. A pure polymer (without nanoparticles) or a composite with large nanoparticles would need a temperature increase of at least 30 degrees Celsius for a comparable effect.

We see a shift in paradigm where going to really small nanoparticles enables accessing totally new properties, said Alexei Sokolov of ORNL and UTK. That increased access to new properties happens because small particles move faster than large ones and interact with fewer polymer segments on the same chain. Many more polymer segments stick to a large nanoparticle, making dissociation of a chain from that nanoparticle difficult.

Now we realize that we can tune the mobility of the particleshow fast they can move, by changing particle size, and how strongly they will interact with the polymer, by changing their surface, Sokolov said. We can tune properties of composite materials over a much larger range than we could ever achieve with larger nanoparticles.

Better together

The ORNL-led study required expertise in materials science, chemistry, physics, computational science and theory. The main advantage of Oak Ridge National Lab is that we can form a big, collaborative team, Sokolov said.

Cheng and UTKs Bobby Carroll carried out experiments they designed with Sokolov. Broadband dielectric spectroscopy tracked the movement of polymer segments associated with nanoparticles. Calorimetry revealed the temperature at which solid composites transitioned to liquids. Using small-angle X-ray scattering, Halie Martin (UTK) and Mark Dadmun (UTK and ORNL) characterized nanoparticle dispersion in the polymer.

To better understand the experimental results and correlate them to fundamental interactions, dynamics and structure, the team turned to large-scale modeling and simulation (by ORNLs Bobby Sumpter and Jan-Michael Carrillo) enabled by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL.

It takes us a lot of time to figure out how these particles affect segmental motion of the polymer chain, Cheng said. These things cannot be visualized from experiments that are macroscopic. The beauty of computer simulations is they can show you how the chain moves and how the particles move, so the theory can be used to predict temperature dependence.

Shi-Jie Xie and Kenneth Schweizer, both of Illinois, created a new fundamental theoretical description of the collective activated dynamics in such nanocomposites and quantitatively applied it to understand novel experimental phenomena. The theory enables predictions of physical behavior that can be used to formulate design rules for optimizing material properties.

Carrillo and Sumpter developed and ran simulations on Titan, Americas most powerful supercomputer, and wrote codes to analyze the data on the Rhea cluster. The LAMMPS molecular-dynamics code calculated how fast nanoparticles moved relative to polymer segments and how long polymer segments stuck to nanoparticles.

We needed Titan for fast turn-around of results for a relatively large system (200,000 to 400,000 particles) running for a very long time (100 million steps). These simulations allow for the accounting of polymer and nanoparticle dynamics over relatively long times, Carrillo said.These polymers are entangled. Imagine pulling a strand of spaghetti in a bowl. The longer the chain, the more entangled it is. So its motion is much slower. Molecular dynamics simulations of long, entangled polymer chains were needed to calculate time-correlation functions similar to experimental conditions and find connections or agreements between the experiments and theories proposed by colleagues at Illinois.

The simulations also visualized how nanoparticles moved relative to a polymer chain. Corroborating experiment and theory moves scientists closer to verifying predictions and creates a clearer understanding of how nanoparticles change behavior, such as how altering nanoparticle size or nanoparticlepolymer interactions will affect the temperature at which a polymer loses enough viscosity to become liquid and start to flow. Large particles are relatively immobile on the time scale of polymer motion, whereas small particles are more mobile and tend to detach from the polymer much faster.

The title of the paper is Big Effect of Small Nanoparticles: A Shift in Paradigm for Polymer Nanocomposites.

Source: ORNL

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Titan Supercomputer Assists With Polymer Nanocomposites Study - HPCwire (blog)

Compressing Software Development Cycles with Supercomputer-based Spark – insideHPC

Anthony DiBiase, Cray

In this video, Anthony DiBiase from Cray presents: Compress Software Development Cycles with supercomputer based Spark.

Do you need to compress your software development cycles for services deployed at scale and accelerate your data-driven insights? Are you delivering solutions that automate decision making & model complexity using analytics and machine learning on Spark? Find out how a pre-integrated analytics platform thats tuned for memory-intensive workloads and powered by the industry leading interconnect will empower your data science and software development teams to deliver amazing results for your business. Learn how Crays supercomputing approach in an enterprise package can help you excel at scale.

Anthony DiBiase is an analytics infrastructure specialist at Cray Supercomputer based in Boston with over 25 years program & project management experience in software development & systems integration. He matches life sciences software groups to computing technology for leading pharma & research organizations. Previously, he helped Novartis on NGS (next generation sequencing) workflows and large genomics projects, and later assisted Childrens Hospital of Boston on: systems & translational biology, multi-modal omics, disease models (esp. oncology & hematology), and stem cell biology. Earlier in his career, he delivered high-throughput inspection systems featuring image processing & machine learning algorithms while at Eastman Kodak, multi-protocol gateway solutions for Lucent Technologies, and mobile telephone solutions for Harris Corporation.

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Compressing Software Development Cycles with Supercomputer-based Spark - insideHPC

Microsoft, Facebook Build Dualing Open Standard GPU Servers for Cloud – TOP500 News

It was only a matter of time until someone came up with an Open Compute Project (OCP) design for a GPU-only accelerator box for the datacenter. That time has come.

In this case though, it was two someones: Microsoft and Facebook. This week at the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, California, both hyperscalers announced different OCP designs for putting eight of NVIDIAs Tesla P100 GPUs into a single chassis. Both fill the role of a GPU expansion box that can be paired with CPU-based servers in need of compute acceleration. The idea is to disaggregate the GPUs and CPUs in cloud environments so that users may flexibly mix these processors in different ratios, depending upon the demands of the particular workload.

The principle application target is machine learning, one of the P100s major areas of expertise. An eight-GPU configuration of these devices will yield over 80 teraflops at single precision and over 160 teraflops at half precision.

Source: Microsoft

Microsofts OCP contribution is known as HGX-1. Its principle innovation is that it can dynamically serve up as many GPUs to a CPU-based host as it may need well, up to eight, at least. It does this via four PCIe switches, an internal NVLink mesh network, plus a fabric manager to route the data through the appropriate connections. Up to four of the HGX-1 expansion boxes can be glued together for a total of 32 GPUs. Ingrasys, a Foxconn subsidiary will be the initial manufacturer of the HGX-1 chassis.

The Facebook version, which is called Big Basin, looks quite similar. Again, P100 devices are glued together vial an internal mesh, which they describe as similar to the design of the DGX-1, NVIDIAs in-house server designed for AI research. A CPU server can be connected to the Big Basin chassis via one or more PCIe cable. Quanta Cloud Technology will initially manufacture the Big Basin servers.

Source: Facebook

Facebook said they were able to achieve a 100 percent performance improvement on ResNet50, an image classification model, using Big Basin, compared to its older Big Sur server, which uses the Maxwell-generation Tesla M40 GPUs. Besides image classification, Facebook will use the new boxes for other sorts deep learning training, such as text translation, speech recognition, and video classification, to name a few.

In Microsofts case, the HGX-1 appears to be the first of multiple OCP designs that will fall under its Project Olympus initiative, which the company unveiled last October. Essentially, Project Olympus is a related set of OCP hardware building blocks for cloud hardware. Although HGX-1 is suitable for many compute-intensive workloads, Microsoft is promoting it for artificial intelligence work, calling it the Project Olympus hyperscale GPU accelerator chassis for AI, according to a blog posted by Azure Hardware Infrastructure GM Kushagra Vaid.

Vaid also set the stage for what will probably become other Project Olympus OCP designs, hinting at future platforms that will include the upcoming Intel Skylake Xeon and AMD Naples processors. He also left open the possibility that Intel FPGAs or Nervana accelerators could work their way into some of these designs.

In addition, Vail brought up the possibility of a ARM-based OCP server via the companys engagement with chipmaker Cavium. The software maker has already announced its using Qualcomms new ARM chip, the Centriq 2400, in Azure instances. Clearly, Microsoft is keeping its cloud options open.

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Microsoft, Facebook Build Dualing Open Standard GPU Servers for Cloud - TOP500 News

Stem Cell Therapy Market by Type, Therapeutic Application, Cell Source – Global Forecasts to 2021 – PR Newswire (press release)

NEW YORK, March 7, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- l stem cell therapy market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 11.0% during 2016 to 2021 to reach USD 145.8 million by 2021. Growth in the global stem cell therapy market is driven by factors such as the growing awareness of the therapeutic potency of stem cells in effective disease management, development of advanced genome-based cell analysis techniques, increasing public-private investments for development of stem cell therapies, identification of new stem cell lines, and developments in infrastructure related to stem cell banking and processing. In addition, countries such as Japan, South Korea, and China are offering new growth opportunities for players operating in this market. The North American region is expected to command the largest share in the stem cell therapy market in 2016.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p04759526-summary/view-report.html

Based on the type of therapy, the allogeneic stem cell therapy segment is estimated to command the larger share of the global stem cell therapy market in 2016. This growth can be attributed to the growing availability of allogeneic stem cell therapy products, wider therapeutic applications of allogeneic stem cells, easier production scale-up due to easy availability of sources of stem cells, and growing number of clinical trials of allogeneic stem cell therapies as compared to autologous stem cell therapies.

The stem cell therapy market is niche industry with a growing number of global and local companies involved in the development and commercialization of stem cell therapy products. Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. (U.S.), MEDIPOST Co., Ltd. (South Korea), Anterogen Co., Ltd. (South Korea), and Pharmicell Co., Ltd. (South Korea) were the leading players in the global stem cell therapy market in 2015. New product launches and approvals; expansions; and partnerships and agreements are the major strategies adopted by most of the market players to achieve growth in the stem cell therapy market during 20132016.

Research Coverage This report studies stem cell therapy market based on type of therapy (allogeneic and autologous). These stem cell therapies are used for the treatment of various diseases (including musculoskeletal disorders, wound healing, CVDs, and GI diseases, among others). The report also studies, the factors (such as drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges) which affect the market growth in a positive and negative manner. It analyzes opportunities and challenges in the market for stakeholders and provides details of the competitive landscape for market leaders. The report forecasts the revenue of the market segments with respect to four main regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World. The stem cell therapy market report strategically profiles the key players who are involved in the manufacturing and commercialization of stem cell therapy products and comprehensively analyze their market ranking and core competencies. The report tracks and analyzes competitive developments such as new product launches and enhancements; expansions; and partnerships and agreements in the stem cell therapy market.

Reasons to Buy the Report:

From an insight perspective, this research report focuses on various levels of analysismarket share analysis of the top players and company profiles, which together comprise and discuss basic views on the competitive landscape; emerging and high-growth segments of the stem cell therapy market; and high-growth regions and their respective drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities.

The report will enrich both established firms as well as new entrants/smaller firms to gauge the pulse of the market, which in turn will help firms in garnering a greater market share. Firms purchasing the report could use any one or a combination of the below-mentioned five strategies (market penetration, product development/innovation, market development, market diversification, and competitive assessment) for strengthening their market shares.

The report provides insights on the following pointers:

- Market Penetration: Comprehensive information on products offered by the top 10 players in the stem cell therapy market. The report analyzes the stem cell therapy market by type, therapeutic application, cell source, and region

- Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on research and development activities, developmental product pipeline, and new product launches in the stem cell therapy market

- Market Development: Comprehensive information about the lucrative emerging markets. The report analyzes the markets for various stem cell therapy products across four geographies (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World)

- Competitive Assessment: Assessment of market shares, strategies, products, distribution networks, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players in the stem cell therapy market

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p04759526-summary/view-report.html

About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

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Stem Cell Therapy Market by Type, Therapeutic Application, Cell Source - Global Forecasts to 2021 - PR Newswire (press release)

Rolling Stone Australia – Yoko Ono on John, Bowie and Spirituality – Rolling Stone Australia

83-year old artist and musician, Yoko Ono, shares with us her Words of Wisdom, including childhood fables, ephemeral success and why it's important to get outside.

Who are your heroes? That's easy my husband, John Lennon. He was the only person who put up with me. It's difficult for a guy to understand what women are thinking. Most guys don't even listen. He was very forward-thinking in that sense. He really jumped into feminism, no argument. He would ask me, "Could you find feminist groups for me?" Even now, I don't think men get together and say, "Let's be feminists."

Do you have a favourite city? I love every city I've been to, but Liverpool is great. John and I would pass through and say hello to relatives. People there are really strong in spirit, especially the women. I wouldn't say they're working-class I don't think they'd like for me to label them that way but they have a working-class mentality, a strength and wisdom.

What music still moves you? Indian music is incredible. Gypsy music is fantastic. All the Middle Eastern music is very strong. John and I loved folk songs from different countries the rhythm and the harmonies are very, very different. I can't say, you know, "Be-Bop-a-Lula".

What do you think John would have made of social media? John felt that something like social media would come out. He was doing that anyway. When somebody said something he didn't like, he would send a letter: "It's not true!" He would never ignore those communications.

Do you have a fitness regimen? I walk around. Walking is such a great way to relax. I know it might be dangerous, but that's only in the corner of my mind. Maybe I'm the only one now. Very few famous people are walking around now. They disappeared. It's that kind of world. It's sad, isn't it?

What's the best advice you've gotten? I don't take advice. My background is very different, so it's very difficult for a person to advise me. My parents were very liberal and cherished that I had my own opinions. Other people's thinking is theirs, and my thinking is mine. There's no point in listening. And, so far, it's gone well.

Did you get advice about how to make records a certain way? I make records my certain way.

What was your favourite book growing up? There were two, and both are Chinese. One, Sangokushi, tells you how to battle very carefully and logically. The other, Saiyuki, has more to do with spiritual travelling. One monk decides how to solve a situation, not in a battle. One guy is very cocky. He says, "I know everything, and I can fly to the end of the world in 10 seconds." The monk says, "Show me how you do it." The guy goes zoom, zoom to the end of the world, and at the end are five huge poles. He says, "I'll put my name on that." He writes his name and goes back to the monk and says, "I just went to the end of the world." And he says, "Oh, really?" The monk opens up his hand and says, "Are these the poles?" Meaning the guy never went anywhere. He never went outside of the monk's five fingers.

What's your favourite memory of your friend David Bowie? He was one of the very few people who liked my work. I think he said something about my music in [the 1992 compilation] Onobox that was very nice. At the time, nobody cared about it, and he was courageous to say something.

What books are you reading right now? I usually read three books at once. One right now is The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success [by Deepak Chopra]. It pretends to be about success so people will say, "I want to read that!" But actually, he's making a very good statement about how you can be spiritually successful. I love actual printed books. I can't get out of that yet.

Have you thought about writing a memoir? No. That would be a very tricky thing to do. I care about writing something that would make some people feel bad, even though they maybe were bad. I think about their children and wives, and I don't want to hurt anybody. So the book would be rather...boring [laughs].

What's the best part of success? Well, I don't know, because I'm not successful yet. We're not getting world peace.

Is that your gauge for success? Well, I wouldn't say, "Until then", but it's one of the big things for me.

What do you do to relax? Relax? I don't relax too much. I'm always thinking about the next project.

Last November marked the 50th anniversary of you meeting John for the first time, when he attended your gallery show in London. You had a spyglass he looked into that said, "Yes". What does that work mean to you now? At the time I had a very difficult life. I said, "Well, I want to change it", and this was a sign that said "yes" instead of "no". It saved me.

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Rolling Stone Australia - Yoko Ono on John, Bowie and Spirituality - Rolling Stone Australia

Songs We Love: Benjamin Booker, ‘Witness (Feat. Mavis Staples)’ – 90.5 WESA

What does it mean to say you've witnessed something? Maybe you were simply in the right place at the right time; maybe you were a bystander who watched silently as an event played out before you. But to bear witness implies something more powerful. When you bear witness in a courtroom or a church, you're an active party, testifying as to what you've seen. One who bears witness speaks of her firsthand experience of an incident, of spiritual enlightenment, of truth itself back into the world so that it might change an outcome or a life.

It's that second sort that interests Benjamin Booker in "Witness," the title track from the follow-up to his explosive 2014 debut. The New Orleans-based songwriter who's favored a sound like the blues, soul and rock 'n' roll mixed with gasoline and a lit cigarette leans into more explicitly gospel territory here, letting his strepitous guitar take a backseat to an upright-piano melody and choral harmonies. Booker mourns violence against black bodies and hints at the insidious consequences of bearing false witness: "Thought that we saw that he had a gun / Thought that it looked like he started to run." Meanwhile, Mavis Staples sings the song's chorus, lending her typical moral urgency to its central question: "Am I going to be a witness ... just going to be a witness?"

To accompany the announcement of the album, Booker has written an essay detailing the experience that led him towards writing the album's title song, which you can read in full below.

"Once you find yourself in another civilization you are forced to examine your own."

--James Baldwin

By February of 2016, I realized I was a songwriter with no songs, unable to piece together any words that wouldn't soon be plastered on the side of a paper airplane.

I woke up one morning and called my manager, Aram Goldberg.

"Aram, I got a ticket south," I said. "I'm going to Mexico for a month."

"Do you speak Spanish?" he asked.

"No," I answered. "That's why I'm going."

The next day I packed up my clothes, books and a cheap classical guitar I picked up in Charleston. I headed to Louis Armstrong Airport and took a plane from New Orleans to Houston to Mexico City.

As I flew above the coast of Mexico, I looked out the plane window and saw a clear sky with the uninhabited coast of a foreign land below me.

I couldn't help but smile.

My heart was racing.

I was running.

I rented an apartment on the border of Juarez and Doctores, two neighborhoods in the center of the city, near the Baleras metro station, and prepared to be mostly alone.

I spent days wandering the streets, reading in parks, going to museums and looking for food that wouldn't make me violently ill again. A few times a week I'd meet up with friends in La Condesa to sip mezcal at La Clandestina, catch a band playing at El Imperial or see a DJ at Pata Negra, a local hub.

I spent days in silence and eventually began to write again.

I was almost entirely cut off from my home. Free from the news. Free from politics. Free from friends.

What I felt was the temporary peace that can come from looking away. It was a weightlessness, like being alone in a dark room. Occasionally, the lights would be turned on and I'd once again be aware of my own mass.

I'd get headlines sent to me from friends at home.

"More Arrests at U.S. Capitol as Democracy Spring Meets Black Lives Matter"

"Bill Clinton Gets Into Heated Exchange with Black Lives Matter Protester"

That month, Americans reflected on the murder of Freddie Gray by Baltimore police a year earlier.

I'd turn my phone off and focus on something else. I wasn't in America.

One night, I went to Pata Negra for drinks with my friend Mauricio. Mau was born and raised in Mexico City and became my guide. He took me under his wing and his connections in the city made my passage through the night a lot easier.

We stood outside of Pata Negra for a cigarette and somehow ended up in an argument with a few young, local men. It seemed to come out of nowhere and before I knew it I was getting shoved to the ground by one of the men.

Mau helped me get up and calmly talked the men down. I brushed the dirt off of my pants and we walked around the block.

"What happened?" I asked him.

"It's fine," he said. "Some people don't like people who aren't from here."

He wouldn't say it, but I knew what he meant.

It was at that moment that I realized what I was really running from.

Growing up in the South, I experienced my fair share of racism but I managed to move past these things without letting them affect me too much. I knew I was a smart kid and that would get me out of a lot of problems.

In college, if I got pulled over for no reason driving I'd casually mention that I was a writer at the newspaper and be let go soon after by officers who probably didn't want to see their name in print.

"Excuse me, just writing your name down for my records."

I felt safe, like I could outsmart racism and come out on top.

It wasn't until Trayvon Martin, a murder that took place about a hundred miles from where I went to college, and the subsequent increase in attention to black hate crimes over the next few years that I began to feel something else.

Fear. Real fear.

It was like every time I turned on the TV, there I was. DEAD ON THE NEWS.

I wouldn't really acknowledge it, but it was breaking me and my lack of effort to do anything about it was eating me up inside.

I fled to Mexico, and for a time it worked.

But, outside of Pata Negra, I began to feel heavy again and realized that I might never again be able to feel that weightlessness. I knew then that there was no escape and I would have to confront the problem

The song "Witness" came out of this experience and the desire to do more than just watch.

If you grew up in the church you may have heard people talk about "bearing witness to the truth."

In John 18:37, Pilate asked Jesus if he is a king. Jesus replies, "You say that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, that I may bear witness to the truth. Everyone being of the truth hears My voice."

In 1984, the New York Times printed an article titled "Reflections of a Maverick" about a hero of mine, James Baldwin.

Baldwin has the following conversation with the writer, Julius Lester.

Witness is a word I've heard you use often to describe yourself. It is not a word I would apply to myself as a writer, and I don't know if any black writers with whom I am contemporary would, or even could, use the word. What are you a witness to?

Witness to whence I came, where I am. Witness to what I've seen and the possibilities that I think I see. ...

What's the difference between a spokesman and a witness?

A spokesman assumes that he is speaking for others. I never assumed that I never assumed that I could. Fannie Lou Hamer (the Mississippi civil rights organizer), for example, could speak very eloquently for herself. What I tried to do, or to interpret and make clear was that what the Republic was doing to that woman, it was also doing to itself. No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society.

"Witness" asks two questions I think every person in America needs to ask.

"Am I going to be a Witness?" and in today's world, "Is that enough?"

Witness comes out June 2 via ATO Records.

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Songs We Love: Benjamin Booker, 'Witness (Feat. Mavis Staples)' - 90.5 WESA

Album Review: The Magnetic Fields’ ’50 Song Memoir’ – Vulture – Vulture

Great album titles serve as skeleton keys to deeper understanding of the themes explored in the music. Nevermind echoed the fatalist sigh of Nirvanas 1991 calling card Smells Like Teen Spirit and the ennui clouding Kurt Cobains emotional thermostat. To Pimp a Butterfly illustrated the war between integrity and celebrity broiling inside of Kendrick Lamar throughout his 2015 opus. In his flagship outfit, the Magnetic Fields, New York singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Stephin Merritt has used album titles as ground rules for writing exercises. Charm of the Highway Strip, from 1995, is a song cycle about lives in geographic motion. The beloved 1999 triple album 69 Love Songs is literally 69 love songs; 2004s i is a string of first-person romance narratives, and 2008s Distortion bathed a batch of peppy surf-rock nuggets in a thick and forbidding squall of reverb.

This weeks 50 Song Memoir is another clever thematic conceit. As per a pitch put forth by Nonesuch Records president Robert Hurwitz, Merritt was to write a single song about each year of his life, to commemorate his 50th birthday. Hurwitzs request was sneaky: 69 Love Songs alongside a trickle of albums from his side projects Future Bible Heroes, the 6ths, and the Gothic Archies is proof the Magnetic Fields mastermind can bang out a couple dozen songs in a year or so, but 50 Song Memoir complicates matters by forcing Merritt, a lover of the three-minute story song and a writer blessed with a novelists devotion to fictitious lives and neatly arranged character development, to turn the lens on himself. It was a lofty request and, for this band at this specific moment in its journey, a risky one.

Magnetic Fields albums have grown incrementally and at times gratingly more twee in the 2010s, from cloying teen pop like The Only Boy in Town and Id Go Anywhere With Hugh to drier but still cutesy observational yarns like We Are Having a Hootenanny and The Dolls Tea Party. Merritt is a wryly funny, famously terse figure who, even when he feels like giving, still retains a certain air of distance. I am the least autobiographical person you are likely to meet, he says in a lengthy interview in the 50 Song Memoir liner notes with friend and collaborator Daniel Handler, better known to fans of Gothic childrens literature as Lemony Snicket of A Series of Unfortunate Events. If Memoir indulged Merritts schmaltzier instincts, or revealed a life less intriguing than his formidable gallery of character sketches, it could fail spectacularly.

These worries are assuaged on Memoirs first side alone, as Merritt turns in 68: Cat Called Dionysus, a wistful, tragicomic remembrance of an escaped family pet he loved unrequitedly, set to clattering folk-rock recalling the orchestral bits of the Byrds 1968 classic Notorious Byrd Brothers, and 70: Theyre Killing Children Over There, which sways between psych rock and new wave as kid Stephin is taken to a Jefferson Airplane concert, where he mishears Airplane singer Grace Slicks onstage protest of child death in the Vietnam War as a warning that a massacre is taking place inside their very concert hall. From there, its apparent what 50 Song Memoir intends to accomplish, and what it ultimately delivers: a pointillist sketch of an entire life, rendered in quick, close readings of kooky personal milestones.

Memoir carries Stephin Merritt from ashrams and tropical islands in his mothers globe-trotting quest for spiritual enlightenment to self-discovery on New Yorks gay club scene as disco gave way to new wave and synth-pop under the shadow of the AIDS pandemic; struggles as a starving musician; and romantic pitfalls that complicated his professional triumphs. The man turns out to be just as lively as any of his inventions, whether hes 8 and giving his moms boyfriend hell for writing a song using a lyric sheet he stole from the kid, or 30 and shaken by the notion that he has failed in his chosen profession, or 47 and mourning how quickly his favorite stores and bars close up whenever he spends significant time away from the city.

Memoirs pillars are change, heartbreak, and a profound love of music. Like a true music obsessive, Merritts stories feel inextricably tied to the songs that soundtrack them, so in the early-80s stretch where he begins to fixate on synth-pop and while away school nights in the gay nightclub and Madonna haunt Danceteria, the instrumentation runs cold and electric, just as the pre-millennial stretch from 98: Lovers Lies to 00: Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers mirrors alt-rocks stately embrace of cinematic electronics at the time. (See also: Radioheads OK Computer, Blurs 13, and Grandaddys The Sophtware Slump.)

Thats not to say 50 Song Memoir is merely an exercise in the excavation of personal tastes or a successor to music-geek autobiographical-playlist projects like Nick Hornbys Songbook. Really, it is a celebration of Merritts sky-high range as a writer and a player, through the exploration of the circumstances that helped cultivate it. It is the Magnetic Fields love letter to itself. (Merritt notes in the interview with Handler that a few of the recordings used for the album actually date back to whatever year theyre meant to commemorate. So 00: Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers is a holdover from the shelved soundtrack to a film from that period that also never surfaced, and the intro to the sitar reverie 87: At the Pyramid is really lifted from Merritts and longtime bandmate Claudia Gonsons late-80s sound experiments.)

The sheer audacity of this project is unshakable. The album is two-and-a-half hours long, for starters, and sprawled out over five separate discs in its physical form. Theres too much of it to get through in a single sitting, although your patience is rewarded in hooks and withering turns of phrase. Still, its hard to argue that every single one of these tracks is essential, especially bits that appear to circumvent the albums theme. (89: The 1989 Musical Marching Zoo doesnt really cover Merritts experience of 1989, since its really about a pop record from the late 60s. And technically, the inclusion of certain period pieces originally intended for inclusion in films, like 00: Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers and 10: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, bends the concept a little. But hey, they work!)

The chronological order of the sequencing doesnt engender much stability either, the way the intentional compositional constraints of the blistering Distortion and 2010s mostly acoustic Realism facilitated more controlled listening experiences than 69 Love Songs. Memoir gets a little drunk on its own reach sometimes, like on 91: The Day I Finally , which is more intriguing as a lo-fi one-man-band recording experiment than an expression of the rage in its lyrics. More often than not, though, this restlessness feels like a good-faith gesture toward rescuing a long listening experience from the slightest hint of predictability: One minute were served an atheist gospel song in 74: No, and then were shoved through the ringing, washed-out sonics of 75: My Mama Aint and the disco beat and fake British accent of 76: Hustle 76.

Stephin Merritts deliberate hand as a lyricist helps steady 50 Song Memoir as his collectives wanderlust as arrangers and instrumentalists keep it in stylistic flux. No matter the subject, the lyric hooks by the end of the second line, and the rhyme is impeccable. The cat songs kickoff is concise but foreboding: We had a cat called Dionysus / Every day, another crisis. The philosophical student/teacher tte--tte 86: How I Failed Ethics sets up its plot, academic obsessiveness, and extreme attention to detail in less than 30 seconds: Though majoring in Visual and Environmental Studies, and minoring in History of Sci / I had to retake Ethics from my Mennonite professor, for whom my skepticism didnt fly. The album flits between storytelling that lets the absurdity of a situation do all the talking and personal writing that obscures names and locations, selling the bare emotion an incident provokes ahead of any formal details. 04: Cold-Blooded Man passionately wishes the worst for an ex-boyfriend, losing no efficacy for never explaining why.

50 Song Memoir is just as incisive with melody as with words. If youre a 69 Love Songs diehard pondering the value of wading through another four-dozen Merritt tunes, know that this set is a few degrees more daring in its melodic composition and also in the singers delivery of it. (The latter is a gift, since the albums first-person-narrative conceit ostensibly prevents lead vocals from any of the bands other more limber singers.) The lead on the polyamorous 93: Me and Fred and Dave and Ted is both beguilingly offbeat and surprisingly catchy, as is the sparse, dubby Young Marble Giants nod 85: Why Am I Not a Teenager. The vocal affectations on the albums dance tunes are a blast as well. Check the too-excited acid house homage 97: Eurodisco Trio or the rigid, instructional 81: How to Play the Synthesizer as well as sporadic nods to British synth-pop singers like Depeche Modes Dave Gahan and Ultravoxs John Foxx. The albums production is just as audacious and varied. Stepping out of 69 Love Songs into 50 Song Memoir feels like slipping out of a favorite house shoe into an elaborately cushioned runner.

The new set isnt out to dethrone the Magnetic Fields signature album, though. Were here for Merritt on Merritt, finally, definitively, for our edification as much as his. The projects enduring value to its creator is laid bare in the closing-stretch tearjerker 14: I Wish I Had Pictures, where he regrets not taking more photographs in his youth, because all these old memories are fading away. Eventually he decides that these songs will have to suffice. 50 Song Memoir is a chance for Merritt to nail his memories down in an indelible document, a delightful flip through the untold back pages of one of rocks most singular voices, and, all in all, the best damned Magnetic Fields album in the last ten years.

First Photos From Thor: Ragnarok Reveal That It May Be Part of the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards Universe

Rough Night Trailer: Scarlett Johansson and Kate McKinnon Have a Wild and Murderous Bachelorette Weekend

Another star is also born.

The show only takes seven weeks.

Were all just laughing with him.

This Cape Fear continuity photo reminds the viewer of the intensity of Robert De Niros performance and of the iconic collaboration that produced it.

The 1965 science-fiction novel has long intrigued talented directors, only to leave their dreams in tatters.

The presidents entire staff appears to treat him like a dangerously strong show chimp.

That darkness aint mood lighting.

Welcome to the revolution of love, to our refusal as women to accept this new age of tyranny.

The time for competing El Chapo projects is nigh.

McLean previously pleaded guilty to domestic violence assault.

Another season of making money happen.

David Haller has officially lost control.

Contrabrand zooms out to show us the literal landscape of slavery.

Charlie Hunnam and his mustache meet their destiny.

Twelve seasons in, the FXX sitcom has a bona fide breakthrough.

Recent legislation and rhetoric have put decades of progress for girls and women at risk.

King George III the First returns.

The Night King and Dragons are coming.

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Album Review: The Magnetic Fields' '50 Song Memoir' - Vulture - Vulture

An atheist fasts for Lent: Week 2 big returns on small sacrifices – The Daily Vox (blog)

My very first Lent, I thought it would be a cool idea to fast with my best friend, Greg. He loves coffee to the extent that his coffee machine means more to him than the kitchen in which it resides. He gave up coffee, so I gave up tea. It was difficult. What was more difficult was coming to terms with the broader understanding of sacrifice, and thats something that has come with time.

According to the Bible, Jesus Christ sacrificed himself to save the world from sin. Islam tells us that the Prophet Mohammed sacrificed his material wealth and comfort to further Islamic teachings. In Hinduism, it is encouraged that worldly possessions and thoughts are discarded for the sake of spiritual enlightenment. Sacrifice is an integral part of Judaism, with the word for sacrifice korban, meaning drawing near is a way of drawing oneself closer to God.

These teachings are the basis for which most people hold their fasts and it is in the spirit of the ones who came before that they keep them.

I grew up with a very different notion of sacrifice. My parents struggled each day to make ends meet. I saw the sacrifices they made to give me and my sister the best of everything, be it education or shoes. I also saw how they sacrificed their youth, time, leisure, and even relationships for the freedom of South Africa. Late night meetings turned into violent protests, and time spent in jail under the 90 Day Act. Months of planning turned into years of struggle, and they sacrificed the best years of their lives for others.

So 40 days is quite doable.

The purpose may be different but the essence is the same. My grandfather once told me that hands offered outward in service to others are of no less value than hands put together in prayer.

Since that first Lent, I realised that sacrificing something just for the sake of it can be an insult to its intention. Giving up tea that year showed me that I could make a small sacrifice. Now, there needs to be something bigger behind each sacrifice.

One year, it was fizzy drinks. Then it was taking up projects, like completing reading lists, and later giving my time to libraries and volunteer programmes. One year, a friend and I took to boycotting Israeli and animal-tested products something that has lasted to this day. Last year, I launched a website that gives survivors of sexual assault a platform to tell their stories anonymously.

My attempt to give up refined sugar isnt going as well as I had hoped but Ive been better with refusing plastic cutlery and takeaway boxes, and walking half an hour a day. Its been just one week, and its been a journey.

I have walked just under 10 kilometres in total, each day driving me to be a little more active so I can have more energy to give to my family and work. I have declined takeaway packaging on three polystyrene boxes and countless forks, which is hopefully lessening my carbon footprint. If each person thought about what they can do, even in the smallest ways, to positively affect those in their sphere of influence, perhaps we can change the world.

The key is to start small. Know your limitations. Know where you can go big. Regardless of your creed, you can make a difference; giving things up or giving to others is in our hands.

Nikita is managing editor of The Daily Vox by day and music Jedi master by night. She can be seen in the photography pit or stage left with her camera in hand. You could also try spot her around inner city Johannesburg trying to be cool. She can also be found trying to source corn dogs. If you see her, buy her a corn dog. She loves corn dogs.

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An atheist fasts for Lent: Week 2 big returns on small sacrifices - The Daily Vox (blog)

Ani-Choying-Drolma-Nepals-rock-star-nun – Story | BRProud – www.brproud.com

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(CNN) - Ani Choying Drolma was not stabbed as a teenager by her Tibetan sculptor father in one of his many fits of rage.

That, says Drolma, is an urban legend which has been amplified during the two decades in which she has been telling her incredible story to journalists around the world.

Not that her biography needs exaggeration.

Born in Nepal to Tibetan refugee parents, Drolma's rise from teenage nun to international music star is the stuff of fairytales. Her prolific philanthropic work and subsequent role as Nepal's first UNICEF national ambassador has earned her comparisons to India's Mother Teresa.

But with 12 pop albums to her name Drolma is arguably a more unusual, groundbreaking figure.

Unmarried and child-free, when Drolma, 45, drives herself around the chaotic capital of Kathmandu in her saffron robes honking her horn as her songs blast from the radio, she is defying just about every expectation of women in Nepal.

"I have been the most revolutionary person I can think of in my society," Drolma tells CNN.

She isn't exaggerating.

Drolma's father did hit her.

"Small things irritated him and he'd beat me and my mum," she says. "Today, I see it as a disease he was suffering from. But in those days we all suffered because of it."

Aged 10, full of anger and fear, Drolma resolved to become a Buddhist nun -- in Nepal, nuns are not permitted to marry or have children.

"I thought, 'If I grow up and get married that man will treat me the same way'. Domestic violence is a big problem in our society."

Her parents were approving of Drolma's decision -- "our cultural belief is that when someone becomes a nun they are going to live their life more positively" -- and three years later she was accepted by a local monastery.

Without hesitation, Drolma shed her hair, everyday clothing and birth name, Dolma Tsekyid.

"When I first got (my head) shaved I felt so free, I could feel the breeze."

Nagi Gompa monastery was located on a mountaintop in the Kathmandu Valley, and to Drolma it was "paradise".

"The whole environment there was beautiful. Everyone was kind, and I never got beaten, or had to carry my two younger brothers on my back. Or do the cleaning.

"I was given my childhood back."

In Nepal, where 37% of girls are married before age 18, according to Human Rights Watch, Drolma had bought herself valuable time.

Foreigners would often visit Nagi Gompa seeking spiritual enlightenment.

In 1993, American record producer Steve Tibbetts turned up at the hilltop retreat with his wife to learn meditation under Tulku Urgyen, who he described as "a greatmeditation master" and Drolma's main teacher.

On their last night, a translator at the monastery asked Tibbetts to record Drolma, then aged 22, singing.

"She sort of rolled her eyes -- 'Whois this guy with his cassette recorder?' -- took a deep breath, and sang somelines from 'Leymon Tendrel.' Iwasamazed, dumbfounded," Tibbetts says.

So dumfounded, in fact, that Tibbetts forgot to press "record".

"There's a quality in her singing that cutsto the heart of what it's like to be human," he says."That quality, that tonality, justgoes right to the centerof your chest."

Tibbetts returned a few days later and captured Drolma's voice. On returning to the US, he set her haunting Buddhist hymns to a guitar track, and sent the recording to Nepal, suggesting the pair collaborate on an album.

"Without calculation, I just did it," Drolma says, "and later on it created some kind of a miracle in my life."

While Drolma attributes her big break to Tibbetts, he is adamant the opposite is true.

"Just to be clear, she wouldn't be denied," he tells CNN, via email from the United States. "If I hadn't have met her and started her off, she would have found someone else."

The first album was called "Cho".

The vocals were recorded at the nunnery in Nepal, and Tibbetts brought on board the legendary American hit maker Joe Boyd, who has worked with Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and Billy Bragg, to produce the album.

"Cho" sold well -- although Drolma refuses to disclose the figures; "I don't think about numbers" -- and a U.S. tour was planned.

In a country where getting a visa to travel is described by many citizens as being nearly impossible -- a Nepal passport ranked 98th in the world, alongside Sudan, Iran and Eritrea in the 2016 Visa restrictions Index, which measures how many countries citizens can travel to visa-free -- Drolma was given permission to enter the US for a 22-city tour.

"I had two other nuns on stage with me, along with Steve and a guy on sound. We had a huge bus and we toured," she remembers. "In New York we played (Brooklyn venue) the Knitting Factory. The fans were all Americans, there wasn't a Nepali face in sight."

Along with fast food, American women were a culture shock.

"I was surprised by the independence and confidence the women there carried," she says. "They all drove. They were educated. I was inspired."

Back in Nepal, Drolma bought a computer, installed an internet connection at the monastery, and opened a bank account.

The financial resources from the tour gave Drolma the chance to realize her dreams.

In 1998, she founded the Nuns' Welfare Foundation (NWF).

Two years later, she opened the free Arya Tara boarding school in Kathmandu, which today is home to almost 80 young nuns from poor backgrounds in Nepal and India, and run entirely by female nuns.

Unlike at the monastery where Drolma grew up, in addition to religious teachings, the girls receive lessons in English, Nepali, mathematics, science, and computing -- subjects to prepare them for careers. Many have gone on to higher education.

"Some of the nuns later quit being nuns," she explains. "At that point, a secular education helps them survive a modern life."

"I remember (receiving) a letter from Ani after our first tour," says Tibbetts. "She said she'd realized that there was a chance to make some real money on the road and fulfill her dream of creating a school for young girls in difficult circumstances. She told me she wanted to do more tours."

In reality, Tibbetts thought "she was probably more interested in getting a jeep, or a flat somewhere in Kathmandu."

He was wrong. She did exactly "what she said she was going to do", he remembers, and she "smashed through a lot of barriers in the process:religious, cultural, patriarchal".

"I'm the first nun in Nepal sending children in nuns robes into normal colleges," Drolma tells CNN. "They've never had that type of encouragement before."

Over the next decade, Drolma made nearly an album a year: in 2002, her and Tibbetts even recorded in a cave believed to have once been home to 8th century Buddhist guruPadmasambhava.

She has performed around the world -- including to an audience of 20,000 people in Tibet last Easter -- counts superstars like Tina Turner and Tracy Chapman among her fans, and her biography "Singing For Freedom", first published in French in 2008, has been translated into 15 languages.

Drolma has used her position to benefit those less fortunate than herself.

In 2010, the NWF opened the Aarogya Foundation, which provides medical services to those with kidney problems and has successfully lobbied the government to provide free dialysis to poor people in Nepal.

"I lost my mother to kidney disease," Drolma says. "When she was suffering I took her to India twice, but I still couldn't keep her alive."

In 2014, Drolma was made Nepal's first UNICEF national ambassador. In a country where more than 33.9% of children in rural areas and nearly 9.1% in urban settlements are doing some kind of economic work, she was assigned to protect young Nepalis from violence.

In 2011, Drolma showed her willingness to challenge the establishment when she offered sanctuary to a 21-year-old nun who had reportedly been gang raped and ostracized from her religious community.

"She is a human being like everybody else. This could have happened to anybody," Drolma said at the time.

"It could have happened to me, to my sister. The most important thing is to treat her like a human being and then later we can look into the matter of whether she is still a nun."

If Drolma risked being ostracized by speaking out she didn't seem to care.

She had long been criticized in conservative Nepal for appearing in liberal Western magazines like "Marie Claire", her love of Hindi films and her global pop career -- all deemed inappropriate for a nun.

"As a nun," Drolma says, "I'm supposed to be living in a very limited way. Nuns are not supposed to do this, to go there, to say that. They even think a nun should not sing.

"Yet I am someone who has come out and done everything to shock people."

She pauses, and moderates her comments slightly: "I mean, I never sing tragic love songs, they are all meaningful spiritual hymns."

In a patriarchal country, Drolma is unique in having achieved total independence. In Kathmandu she lives in her own flat, drives her own car, and has a successful career.

"I have never regretted my decision to become a nun," she says, with confidence. "Yes, I missed out on the complicated married life. But some married women seem to regret not being able to go here or say this.

"For me, I'm completely enjoying my freedom. In fact, I am grateful for my childhood, even for my father.

"It has all been a blessing in disguise."

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Ani-Choying-Drolma-Nepals-rock-star-nun - Story | BRProud - http://www.brproud.com

Private Space Stations Could Orbit the Moon by 2020, Robert Bigelow Says – Space.com

Giant space-station refueling depots could be orbiting the moon by 2020, but only if the Trump administration makes the funding and national drive needed for it to happen a priority, according to aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow.

Bigelow, whose company, Bigelow Aerospace, has launched three private space-habitat prototypes into orbit including the first inflatable space-station module, said that a commercial station in lunar orbit would be a vital destination for moon exploration.

"The key is going to be how fast the Trump administration can react," Bigelow said in an interview Friday (March 3). The administration would have to move quickly "to energize funds and to galvanize the private sector" to make a lunar depot by end of 2020 possible, he added. [Bigelow Aerospace's Inflatable Space Station Idea (Photos)]

A privately built space station could be in lunar orbit by 2020 to serve as a refueling depot for other spacecraft as depicted in this artist's illustration from space-habitat manufacturer Bigelow Aerospace.

Bigelow spoke with Space.com just days after the private spaceflight company SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, announced that it will launch a private flight around the moon in 2018. On Feb. 26, Musk told reporters SpaceX had "significant deposits" from two as-yet unnamed individuals for a private trip around the moon aboard the company's Dragon crew capsule. The flight will launch on SpaceX's new Falcon Heavy rocket, which is scheduled to make its first test flight later this year.

"SpaceX has indicated that they can provide transportation for a circumlunar flight by 2018," Bigelow said. "If the timeline is met, SpaceX would be in a position to offer commercial transportation to the moon by 2020."

Last week, another space entrepreneur Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos told the Washington Post that his private space company Blue Origin is eyeing its own plan for moon-bound spacecraft and a lunar lander.

This illustration depicts a Bigelow Aerospace BA-330 space habitat in orbit around the moon, where it could serve as a waystation for astronaut crews and a refueling depot for visiting spacecraft.

Bigelow himself has often said that private space stations and habitats for the moon and beyond have been goals for his Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. Last Wednesday (March 1), Bigelow unveiled his company's concept images of a lunar depot on the way to the moon, and in lunar orbit.

Bigelow Aerospace launched two uncrewed prototype inflatable habitats, called Genesis I and Genesis II, in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Then in 2016, the company's Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (or BEAM) was delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship as part of a NASA test for future space habitats. It is the first privately built and inflatable room ever installed on the space station. And so far, it's performed well, Bigelow said. [The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module in Pictures]

"We are pleased, so far, with the performance of the spacecraft," he added.

Bigelow Aerospace has also teamed up with the United Launch Alliance, a launch-providing partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to launch a colossal inflatable space habitat into orbit in 2020. That spacecraft, called the BA-330 for its 330 cubic meters (or about 11,650 cubic feet) of internal volume, would launch on a ULA Atlas V rocket and expand in orbit to serve as a free-flying private space station.

"The BA-330 is three times the size of anything on the ISS," Bigelow told Space.com, adding that the company aims to be able to provide the habitats at a fraction of NASA's cost.

This artist's illustration of a Bigelow Aerospace BA-330 habitat on the way to the moon, powered by two United Launch Alliance ACES rocket stages.

Bigelow said that a BA-330 habitat could potentially be placed into a low-lunar orbit using two of ULA's upgraded Centaur rocket stages, known as ACES (Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage). The space station would orbit somewhere between 100 and 150 kilometers above the moon, serving as a gateway for astronaut crews making their way to or from the lunar surface.

The BA-330 could also be a fueling station for other spacecraft operating near the moon, something that will be essential for the permanent settlement of the moon, Bigelow said.

"You'll be able to give the astronauts a waystation, a place where they can have the experience of being farther from Earth than anyone has been in the last 45 years," he added.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Private Space Stations Could Orbit the Moon by 2020, Robert Bigelow Says - Space.com

Experiment aboard space station studies ‘space weather’ – Phys.Org

March 9, 2017 by Tom Fleischman Steven Powell, research engineer in the department of electrical and computer engineering, is pictured with the Cornell GPS antenna array in a clean room at the NASA/Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The array is currently mounted on the truss structure of the International Space Station. Credit: Zach Tejral, NASA Johnson Spaceflight Center/Provided

The weather here on Earth has been a little strange this winter 60-degree days, followed by blinding snow, only to be followed by 50s and rain but for Steven Powell, the weather he's interested in can't be felt by humans or measured by barometric pressure.

Powell, research support specialist in electrical and computer engineering, is concerned with "space weather" charged particles in the plasma of space, on the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. These particles affect the performance of communications and navigation satellites.

To study conditions in the ionosphere, a band between 50 and 600 miles above the Earth, Powell and others in the College of Engineering have developed the FOTON (Fast Orbital TEC for Orbit and Navigation) GPS receiver, which was built in a Rhodes Hall lab. Last month, the FOTON hitched a ride aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to begin a long-term project at the International Space Station.

The project, which could last two years, is called GROUP-C (GPS Radio Occultation and Ultraviolet Photometry-Colocated), and is headed by Scott Budzien of the Naval Research Laboratory. Powell is the Cornell principal investigator for the project; other Cornell contributors include Mark L. Psiaki, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering (retired); David Hysell, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences; Todd Humphreys, Ph.D. '08; and Brady O'Hanlon, Ph.D. '16.

Also contributing was the late electrical and computer engineering professor Paul Kintner, who died in November 2010. Kintner was responsible for the original ionospheric research that formed the scientific basis for GROUP-C, Powell said.

The FOTON is a highly sensitive GPS receiver, designed to withstand the rigors of spaceflight while detecting subtle fluctuations in the signals from GPS satellites.

"These fluctuations help us learn about the ionosphere in which the signals travel," said Powell, who returned to Ithaca in early March after spending six weeks in Alaska on a project to send two sounding rockets into the aurora borealis, also to study the ionosphere.

"These fluctuations are typically filtered out by standard GPS receivers," he said, "but they are the scientific 'gold nuggets' in the data analysis process."

Powell's experiment is one of a number of projects studying the Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere. It shares a mounting palette on the outside of the ISS, receives power from large solar arrays, and uses the data communications system onboard the station to quickly distribute data back to Earth.

Powell and Hysell will collect data from the GROUP-C experiment.

GROUP-C's position onboard the ISS will allow it to study the ionosphere "at an edge-on perspective," Powell said, to measure variations in electron density. The Cornell team's GPS receiver and antenna actually a suite of three antennas, configured to maximize GPS signals and minimize unwanted reflections from the large metal portions of the ISS will focus on GPS satellites as they move across the sky and set behind the Earth.

As they set, Powell said, the radio signals travel through the ionosphere and are subtly delayed by the denser regions of the ionosphere. "From that, we obtain a vertical profile of the electron density," he said.

This experiment builds on a short-duration NASA sounding-rocket mission Powell led in 2012, which was sent into the aurora to study the ionosphere at high latitudes, near the North Pole.

"This experiment will allow us to study different, but equally interesting, effects in the ionosphere closer to the equator, where most of the world's population lives," Powell said.

The Feb. 19 liftoff of the SpaceX rocket, and docking with the ISS four days later, was the culmination of a nearly four-year effort to get GROUP-C built.

"It was extremely exciting and satisfying to see the GROUP-C experiment [launch]," Powell said. "I've been involved in more than 50 space-based research efforts over a 30-year period, but most have been using suborbital NASA sounding rockets, with mission durations of just 10 to 30 minutes.

"The GROUP-C experiment duration will last up to two years," he said, "so the quantity of data and the potential for meaningful scientific discovery is huge."

Explore further: Sounding rockets study how winds in space drive currents in the upper atmosphere

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Following the successful launch today, June 20, of a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket, launch teams are now preparing for a two-rocket salvo June 24 from the Wallops Flight Facility, Va.

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On Feb. 22, astronomers announced that the ultra-cool dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1, hosts a total of seven Earth-size planets that are likely rocky, a discovery made by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in combination with ground-based ...

In two recently published scientific papers, an international team of astronomers has presented the detection of two new tidal disruption events (TDEs). Using the Palomar Observatory located near San Diego, California, the ...

SpaceX, the upstart company, and NASA, the government agency, both have plans to venture to Mars and orbit the moon. But that doesn't mean they've launched a new space race.

The bright central area of Ceres' Occator Crater, known as Cerealia Facula, is approximately 30 million years younger than the crater in which it lies, according to a new study in the Astronomical Journal. Scientists used ...

A team of astronomers has doubled the number of known young, compact radio galaxiesgalaxies powered by newly energized black holes. The improved tally will help astronomers understand the relationship between the size ...

A huge mass of glowing stardust in a galaxy seen shortly after the Universe's formation has been detected by a UCL-led team of astronomers, providing new insights into the birth and explosive deaths of the very first stars.

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Experiment aboard space station studies 'space weather' - Phys.Org

REVEALED: US made secret Cold War manned space station to SPY on Russia – Express.co.uk

GETTY

From December 1963 to June 1969, the US Air Force spent upwards of $1.5billion on a project known as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) which was eventually cancelled.

Due to the sensitive and classified nature of the project in the height of the Cold War, it is difficult to understand exactly what the US was trying to achieve at the time.

One of the declassified documents, which were released by the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), goes so far as to ask: "Is the MOL a laboratory? Or is it an operational reconnaissance spacecraft? (Or a bomber?)"

However, other documents show that one of the goals was to spy on the Soviet Union.

1 of 15

NRO

Michael Yarymovych, who was at the time technical director of the MOL project, said: "We were doing something that was exciting and important.

"We're going to also do something very important for national security. We are going to go look behind the Iron Curtain defend the nation while doing the exciting things of manned spaceflight.

NRO

Despite spending over six years and the best part of $2billion on the project, the MOL never actually came to fruition as it was plagued by overspending on perpetual delays.

GETTY

However, there were positives that came out of it, such as the remodelling of NASA's two-seat Gemini spacecraft and the development of the Titan-3C launch vehicle.

The research that went into it also helped America become the first nation to land people on the moon in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Michael Collins piloting the module, stepping foot on the lunar satellite.

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REVEALED: US made secret Cold War manned space station to SPY on Russia - Express.co.uk

Can Plants Grow from Clippings on the Space Station? Student Project Will Find Out – Space.com

Raphael Schilling, one of the three student team members who built V3PO, prepared the space station experiment by planting 0.6-inch (1.5 cm) cuttings of Ficus pumila into agar-based nutrient gel four cuttings in each of two compartments.

What started out as an after-school science-club project is now an important experiment aboard the International Space Station.

Astronauts have grown plants from seeds in microgravity before, but three students at the Edith-Stein School Ravensburg & Aulendorf in Germany wondered whether plants could also grow from cuttings. If proven possible, it would be a key development that would help astronauts quickly grow food in space. The students raised money through crowdfunding and industry sponsors to develop their experiment, called V3PO, to fly to the space station.

Maria Koch, Raphael Schilling and David Geray, who started the project about three years ago as 16-year-old students, traveled to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch the launch, which was delayed a day before finally lifting off Feb. 19. [Plants in Space: Photos by Gardening Astronauts]

The V3PO team, along with their teacher and two assisting aerospace engineers (l-r) Chriss Bruderrek, David Geray, Maria Birlem, Raphael Schilling, Brigitte Schuermann, Maria Koch handed over the final experiment to NASA's operations team 36 hours before the scheduled launch.

The team was disappointed when the launch was called off with just 13 seconds to go, but were elated the next day when it finally flew, said Sebastian Rohrer, head of fungicide early biology at the German chemical company BASF's crop protection division and a scientific adviser to the students. "We kind of were staring at the skies and couldn't really believe it that it's now really happened," he told Space.com by phone from near the launch site.

"Everybody was standing there, mouths open, and didn't really know what to do, but then we started shaking hands and cheering and from there, it kind of erupted," he added.

BASF was one of the major sponsors of the students' project, and the company also provided materials and equipment for the students to use.

On Feb. 23, the space station crew installed the NanoRacks module with the experiment, which activated lights and a video feed to document the plants' fate. The whole space-borne package will return to Earth along with SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft in about two weeks, and in the meantime monitoring images are sent down daily.

The V3PO team chose a small, decorative plant called Ficus pumila (commonly called the creeping fig) for the experiment. The plant is compact enough to fit in the two compartments of the tiny box sent to space; each compartment measures 1.6 by 1.2 by 1.8 inches (4 by 3 by 4.5 centimeters). It also can withstand the temperature changes inherent in a flight through space; the plants were cooled to 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) beforehand to make sure they wouldn't grow until they were in microgravity. Four cuttings of the plant, along with a nutrient gel, were placed in each chamber.

After the first launch attempt was called off with just 13 seconds left on the clock, the rocket with V3PO aboard finally lifted off Feb. 19. Here, the students (l-r) Sebastian Rohrer, Maria Koch, Brigitte Schuermann, Chriss Bruderrek, Maria Birlem, Raphael Schilling, David Geray celebrate from their nearby viewpoint.

When the experiment lands back on Earth, the students will re-create the atmospheric conditions the plants went through, to see how Earth-bound plants fare in the same circumstances, the students and teacher, Brigitte Schuermann, told Space.com by phone (through a translator).

On Earth, pieces cut from the plants' stems can shoot out their own roots and grow into new plants a behavior that can be used to replicate crops such as tomatoes on Earth. If the little plant cuttings can grow roots without the help of gravity, they could pave the way for easier food growing on long trips through space, like those astronauts will experience when traveling to Mars someday, the students said.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Can Plants Grow from Clippings on the Space Station? Student Project Will Find Out - Space.com

New Plant Habitat Will Increase Harvest on International Space Station – Space Daily

A new, nearly self-sufficient plant growth system by NASA is headed to the International Space Station soon and will help researchers better understand how plants grow in space. The Advanced Plant Habitat will be used to conduct plant bioscience research on the space station, and help NASA prepare crew to grow their own food in space during deep-space exploration missions.

Some of the components of this new system have arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and are being prepared for delivery to the station on Orbital ATK's seventh commercial resupply mission to the station. The new plant system will join Veggie - NASA's first fresh food growth system already active on station.

Dr. Howard Levine, the project scientist overseeing the development of the advanced system, along with Dr. Gioia Massa, a life science project scientist and deputy project scientist, were two of the researchers who helped design the science requirements for the hardware and the test plan to validate it when it was tested at ORBITEC in Madison, Wisconsin.

"A team of scientists here at Kennedy Space Center have been developing the procedures for the first experiment using a prototype, or engineering development unit, of the plant habitat in the Space Station Processing Facility," Levine said.

Arabidopsis seeds, small flowering plants related to cabbage and mustard, have been growing in the prototype habitat, and will be the first plant experiment, called PH-01, grown in the chamber aboard the space station.

Bryan Onate is the NASA APH project manager in the Exploration Research and Technology Directorate at Kennedy. He described the new plant habitat as a fully enclosed, closed-loop system with an environmentally controlled growth chamber. It uses red, blue and green LED lights, and broad spectrum white LED lights. The system's more than 180 sensors will relay real-time information, including temperature, oxygen content and moisture levels (in the air and soil, near the plant roots, and at the stem and leaf level), back to the team at Kennedy.

"A big difference in this system, compared to Veggie, is that it requires minimal crew involvement to install the science, add water, and perform other maintenance activities," Onate said. "We are learning how plants grow in space and what levels of commodities, such as light and water, are required so we can maximize our growth with the least resources."

The large, enclosed chamber measures 18 inches square, with two inches for the root system and 16 inches available for growth height. It is designed to support commercial and fundamental plant research or other bioscience research aboard the space station for up to a 135-day science investigation, and for at least one year of continuous operation without maintenance.

"I think that the new plant growth habitat will provide tremendous capabilities to do high quality plant physiology research with a variety of plant types on the space station," Massa said. "The plant habitat will enable much more controlled and detailed studies of plant growth in spaceflight."

The advanced system will be activated by astronauts aboard the space station but controlled by the team at Kennedy, minimizing the amount of crew time needed to grow the plants. The space station crew will still perform plant thinning and harvesting.

"Before PH-01 is initiated, there will be a short grow out of Dwarf Wheat and Arabidopsis as part of the post-installation checkout on the space station," Onate said.

The system's Plant Habitat Avionics Real-Time Manager in EXPRESS Rack, or PHARMER, will provide real-time data telemetry, remote commanding and photo downlink to the Kennedy team. An active watering system with sensors will detect when the plants need water and keep water flowing as needed.

Massa said having Veggie and the advanced system on the station will allow studies of food production in space, from the very simple to the complex and controlled.

When all parts are delivered to the station, the habitat will be installed in a standard EXpedite the PRocessing of Experiments to Space Station (EXPRESS) rack in the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo.

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New Plant Habitat Will Increase Harvest on International Space Station - Space Daily

Ceres’ bright spots significantly younger than crater they inhabit – SpaceFlight Insider

Laurel Kornfeld

March 9th, 2017

The bright spots of Occator Crater are shown in enhanced color in this view from NASAs Dawn spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI/LPI

Researchers who studied images of Ceres Occator Crater captured by the Dawn spacecrafts scientific imaging system have determined that its bright spots, composed largely of carbonate salts, are significantly younger than the crater in which they sit.

The bright spots are also evidence that Ceres has experienced cryovolcanic outbursts over long periods of time, making Ceres the closest world to the Sun to have experienced cryovolcanism.

A science team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), which operates Dawns imaging instruments, analyzed images taken by the spacecraft between December 2015 and September 2016, the time period when it orbited just 233 miles (375 kilometers) above the dwarf planets surface.

Occator Crater, home of Ceres intriguing brightest areas, is prominently featured in this image from NASAs Dawn spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

At that close orbit, Dawns cameras were able to capture images with a resolution of just 115 feet (35 meters) per pixel. Detailed photos of Occator Crater, first observed when Dawn entered Ceres orbit in March 2015, show complex geological structures such as fractures, avalanches, and smaller craters within the large one.

Led by Andreas Nathues, Dawn Framing Camera lead investigator, researchers also studied measurements of the area taken by Dawns infrared VIR spectrometer.

Using the data, they determined the bright spots are approximately 4 million years old, making them 30 million years younger than Occator Crater.

The most reflective materials on Ceres surface, the bright spots initially puzzled astronomers who were uncertain about their composition.

With a diameter of 57 miles (92 kilometers), Occator Crater, located in Ceres northern hemisphere, contains a seven-mile (11-kilometer) wide pit in its center as well as steep slopes and jagged mountains at its edges that rise as high as 2,461 feet (750 meters).

A bright dome-shaped structure within the central pit rises 1,312 feet (400 meters). Fractures are visible along the structure of the 1.87-mile (three-km) wide dome.

In these data, the origin and evolution of the crater as it presents itself today can be read more clearly than ever before, Nathues said.

Based on the presence of the pit and the jagged ridges, researchers believe Occator Crater was created when an asteroid or comet impacted Ceres 34 million years ago.

The impact produced a central mountain within the crater that later collapsed and triggered cryovolcanic activity. Disruption caused by the impact allowed water as well as other dissolved gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, to form a vent system.

Surface fractures were created by eruptions of briny liquids through the vents, bringing with them the carbonate-rich materials that eventually formed the dome.

Scientists believe the dome formed over a long period of time and not as the result of a single event.

The deposits in Occator Crater are composed of carbonate-rich salts. In contrast, other bright spots scattered around the craters edges, thinner and less bright, are a mixture of carbonates and other, darker materials.

By counting and measuring the smaller craters within Occator Crater produced by later impacts scientists were able to determine the ages of both the bright spots and of Occator.

The age and the appearance of the material surrounding the bright dome indicate that Cerealia Facula (the bright spots) was formed by a recurring, eruptive process, which also hurled material into more outward regions of the central pit, Nathues said, noting that similar dome structures have been found on Jupiters moons Ganymede and Callisto.

The surface of the dome was likely created in the most recent eruptions within the crater.

Cryovolcanic activity may still be occurring in Occator Crater, though at a far less intense level than in the past. Images of the crater taken at specific angles reveal a haze scientists view as coming from the sublimation of water.

Earlier images captured by Dawn from higher orbits show regular changes in the craters brightness.

The nature of the light scattering at the bottom of Occator differs fundamentally from that at other parts of the Ceres surface, said MPS scientist Guneshwar Singh Thangjam.The most likely explanation is that near the crater floor, an optically thin, semi-transparent haze is formed.

Researchers think the haze formed by water coming from fractures in the crater floor sublimating in the presence of sunlight.

Dawn is now headed to a different orbital plane and a higher altitude of 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers).

Video courtesy of JPL

Tagged: Ceres cryovolcanism Dawn Occator Crater The Range

Laurel Kornfeld is an amateur astronomer and freelance writer from Highland Park, NJ, who enjoys writing about astronomy and planetary science. She studied journalism at Douglass College, Rutgers University, and earned a Graduate Certificate of Science from Swinburne Universitys Astronomy Online program. Her writings have been published online in The Atlantic, Astronomy magazines guest blog section, the UK Space Conference, the 2009 IAU General Assembly newspaper, The Space Reporter, and newsletters of various astronomy clubs. She is a member of the Cranford, NJ-based Amateur Astronomers, Inc. Especially interested in the outer solar system, Laurel gave a brief presentation at the 2008 Great Planet Debate held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, MD.

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Ceres' bright spots significantly younger than crater they inhabit - SpaceFlight Insider

OneWeb becomes second customer for Blue Origin’s New Glenn booster – SpaceFlight Insider

Jose Flores

March 8th, 2017

Greg Wyler of OneWeb and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin. Photo Credit: Jeff Bezos / Blue Origin

On Wednesday, March 8, 2017, Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos announced on Twitter that OneWeb, an organization committed to making the Internet available and affordableto everyone by 2027, has reached an initial agreement for five launches on Blue Origins New Glennrocket.

Greg Wyler, chairman of OneWeb, also tweeted shortly thereafter to confirm the agreement and state that they will be hard at work creating jobs and satellites at their facility in Exploration Park, Florida, which is across the street from Blue Origins new facility currently under construction.

First BE-4 engine fully assembled. (Click to enlarge) Photo Credit: Jeff Bezos / Blue Origin

This news comes on the heels of yesterdays announcementwhen French-based satellite provider Eutelsat Communications,became the first company to sign a contract with Blue Origin for a launch on the New Glenn rocket.

Frank DiBello, President and CEO of Space Florida, also lauded the announcement which comes during the week of the annual Florida Space Day in Tallahassee. Florida Space Day is when the aerospace industry meets with the Florida Legislature and Governors Office to thank the state of Florida for their continued support.

That support is not unappreciated, and with their continued support, Florida will remain the global leader in enabling space commerce, said Dibello.Space Florida congratulates both Blue Origin and the OneWeb Airbus Satellite partnership on their announcement. Space Florida and its partners are proud to be a part of this transformation.

The New Glennwill be a 23-feet (7-meter) diameter, two-stage orbital launch vehicle with a reusable first stage and an optional third stage.The rockets first stage will be powered by seven BE-4 engines, also being developed and manufactured by Blue Origin.

The BE-4 engine is an oxidizer-rich staged-combustion engine, being developed to end U.S. reliance on Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines. It will be ableto produce 550,000 pounds (249,476 kilograms) of thrust, and a vacuum-optimized variant of the engine, developed for the second stage of the New Glennrocket, will include a longer nozzle.

In addition to powering the New Glenn rocket, United Launch Alliance is also considering theuse of the BE-4 on their next generation Vulcan launcher. Establishing independence from the Russian engineis becoming increasingly important as relations between the two countriesremain strained.

On Monday, March 6, Jeff Bezos unveiled the first fully assembled BE-4 engine on Twitter.

The New Glenn launch vehicles will be manufactured in Florida at a facility currentlyunder constructionin Exploration Park on Kennedy Space Center property. Blue Origin has leased Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to conduct orbital launches of New Glenn,which are slated to begin in 2020.

Tagged: BE-4 Blue Origin Jeff Bezos New Glenn OneWeb The Range

College student and long time space enthusiast, Jose has been a constant visitor to Cape Canaveral since he moved to central Florida. He joined the SFI team in the hopes of becoming more involved in the coverage of spaceflight and space exploration.

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OneWeb becomes second customer for Blue Origin's New Glenn booster - SpaceFlight Insider

NASA authorization bill passes Congress – SpaceFlight Insider

Derek Richardson

March 8th, 2017

Photo Credit: Jason Rhian / SpaceFlight Insider

The first NASA authorization act in more than six years has cleared Congress and is on its way to President Donald Trumps desk for his signature. The NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on March 7, 2017.

Having originated in the Senate, S.442 was passed there on Feb. 17, 2017. Once it made it to the House floor, there was some discussion, but nobody spoke out against it and it was passed by a voice vote.

The NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 directs the space agency to, among other things, study the possibility of using Orion as a means to send astronauts to the International Space Station should the Commercial Crew Program incur delays beyond 2019. Image Credit: James Vaughan / SpaceFlight Insider

S.442 was sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and had seven cosponsors in the Senate from six states, including the two Florida senators, Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio, a Democrat and Republican, respectively.

Once signed by the president, it recommends (not authorizes) $19.5 billion in spending for the U.S. space agency for thefiscal year 2017. Currently, NASA is operating under a continuing resolution that sets its 2017 funding at 2016 levels, which was $19.2 billion.

Additionally, the authorization act sets policy directing NASAs activities. This includes creating a detailed plan for long-term human space exploration, such as the agencys Journey to Mars, and language directing a study to use Orion as a crew transfer vehicle for the International Space Station should the Commercial Crew Program incur delays beyond 2019.

Dr. Mary Lynne Dittmar, the Coalition for Deep Space Explorations Executive Director, said in a March 7 statement: Todays approval of the NASA Transition Authorization Act by Congress sends a clear message to the American people and our international partners that our nation remains committed to NASAs space exploration program.

Since the 2010 Authorization Act, NASA and its industry partners have made significant progress towards returning American astronauts to deep space and deploying the next generation of space telescopes and planetary spacecraft to reaffirm U.S. leadership in space.

Dittmar also said that the new authorization will provide the framework for continued progress toward these national commitments.

We appreciate the hard work of both the House Science, Space and Technology Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee over the last two years that have led to approval of this bipartisan legislation, Dittmar said.

The NASA Authorization act of 2010 passed in September 2010, some two months after the Senates version. Since then, a number of authorization bills have made their way through the House. None passed the Senate, however.

According to Space News, congressional sources say S.442 has the support of the White House.

While the 2018 funding level for NASA has not been announced, there have been some worries regarding whether the space agencys budget will increase or decrease as it was leaked that the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was due to be slashed by 17 percent.

The president announced recently that the department of defense would be seeing an increase of $54 billion while discretionary spending, which includes NASA, would decrease by the same amount.

Despite this, according to Space Policy Online, NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot remains confident in NASA support. He released a memo titled Update on Budget Process in which he explained that the process of formulating the 2018 budget is later than usual because of the presidential transition.

Once the president submits his 2018 budget request, it will then be up to Congress to decide how much money NASA and other discretionary items actually get.

Tagged: Congress FY 2017 FY 2018 Lead Stories NASA NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 Orion S. 442

Derek Richardson is a student studying mass media with an emphasis in contemporary journalism at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. He is currently the managing editor of the student run newspaper, the Washburn Review. He also writes a blog, called Orbital Velocity, about the space station. His passion for space ignited when he watched space shuttle Discovery leap to space on Oct. 29, 1998. He saw his first in-person launch on July 8, 2011 when the space shuttle launched for the final time. Today, this fervor has accelerated toward orbit and shows no signs of slowing down. After dabbling in math and engineering courses in college, he soon realized that his true calling was communicating to others about space exploration and spreading that passion.

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NASA authorization bill passes Congress - SpaceFlight Insider

Trump agency heads already rolling back Obama-era rules on their … – Fox News

President Trumps newly installed agency heads are starting to take a lead role unraveling a web of Obama-era regulations, acting alongside congressional Republicans and the president himself to roll back rules they claim hurt business or simply go too far.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was the latest to peel back red tape.

On his first day of work, for which he arrived Teddy Roosevelt-style on horseback, Zinke ended a ban on lead bullets and fishing tackle on federal lands and water. The ban was imposed to protect animals from lead poisoning, but had been criticized by the National Rifle Association as an attack on gun owners.

Zinke said in a statement he determined the original order was not mandated by any existing statutory or regulatory requirement.The NRA thanked the new secretary for eliminating this arbitrary attack.

Zinke also hinted at more to come in another order, directing agencies to identify areas where recreation and fishing can be expanded.

Meanwhile, the EPA reportedly is set to reverse an Obama-era decision to lock in strict gas mileage requirements for cars and light trucks through 2025.

Together, the moves are part of a three-pronged attack on regulations issued over the last several months and years. It's what White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, at CPAC, dubbed the deconstruction of the administrative state.

The Republican-controlled Congress has moved since the start of the session to nix rules issued toward the end of the last administration. And Trump has directed others to be rolled back, a plan his agencies also are implementing.

In February, for instance, Trump signed an order instructing the Labor Department to delay implementing a rule requiring certain financial professionals to put their clients' interests first. The department could simply abolish it. Trump also ordered agencies to ease the regulatory burdens of ObamaCare, and look at removing two regulations for every new one.

Yet, as the final members of Trumps Cabinet are being confirmed, incoming agency heads also appear to be acting on their own.

The EPA, under Scott Pruitt, last week withdrew its request that owners and operators in the oil and natural gas industry provide information on equipment and emissions at existing operations.

The Washington Examiner reported Monday that Trump also is planning on signing an executive order rolling back Obamas Clean Power Plan which requires states to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third as well as the Interior Departments moratorium on coal leases.

However, the Clean Power Plan order would merely instruct the EPA to overturn it. A similar order was sent out last week, instructing regulators to re-examine President Obamas Clean Water Rule.

In another example of agencies taking the lead, Health Secretary Tom Price says his department will go through existing health care regulations and try to "get rid" of those they determine hurt patients, as Republicans push an ObamaCare replacement bill.

Conservatives, however, are hoping the Trump administration will be an opportunity not just to roll back regulations, but get agencies out of the habit of passing their own.

Regardless of which party controls the White House, we need to get a handle on the regulatory state. Yes, roll back what we can, but also to make sure were going through Congress to put checks in place to restore Article 1 [of the Constitution], Jason Pye, director of public policy and legislative affairs for FreedomWorks, told Fox News.

EPA Administrator Pruitt holds a similar view, telling The Wall Street Journal that his job is not about increasing or reducing regulation.

There is no reason why EPAs role should ebb or flow based on a particular administration, or a particular administrator, he said in a Feb. 17 interview. Agencies exist to administer the law. Congress passes statutes, and those statutes are very clear on the job EPA has to do.

As for revoking rules via Congress, conservatives have pointed to the Congressional Review Act a little-known 1996 law that gives Congress 60 legislative days to reconsider any new regulations. If a resolution of disapproval is signed by the president, then the agency cannot re-submit a regulation in substantially the same form, unless approved by Congress.

The House passed a bill in January the Midnight Rules Relief Act that, if signed by President Trump, would allow Congress to disapprove of multiple regulations at once.

Some Republicans are suggesting a slash-and-burn approach. North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows posted online a 100 days list of rules he wants to see revoked.

But Pye warns most lawmakers are unlikely to be so aggressive.

I think theyre going to be thoughtful. Some, like the Clean Power Plan or the fiduciary rule, are unavoidable -- you have to start rolling those back, he said. With that said, we should be pursuing legislative measures, not just rolling regulations back, but making sure a future president cant impact negatively impact [the] economy through [regulation].

Adam Shaw is a Politics Reporter and occasional Opinion writer for FoxNews.com. He can be reached here or on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.

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Trump agency heads already rolling back Obama-era rules on their ... - Fox News

Lightfoot seeks stability at NASA despite budget uncertainty – SpaceNews

NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said he believed that NASA "has fared fairly well" in deliberations on the administration's 2018 budget proposal. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

GREENBELT, Md. NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said that a new NASA authorization bill should provide continuity for the agencys programs despite swirling questions about potential budget cuts.

Lightfoot, speaking at the American Astronautical Societys Goddard Memorial Symposium here March 8, praised the passage the previous evening of a new NASA authorization bill by the House, two and a half weeks after the Senate approved it. That act, expected to be signed into law in the coming days, is the first NASA authorization bill passed by Congress since the fall of 2010.

Its pretty exciting for us. We hadnt had one since 2010, he said. For me, the overall theme of that document is constancy of purpose. It says, Keep going with what your plan is and keep moving.

The bill reaffirms Mars as a long-term destination for human spaceflight, but does require NASA to develop more detailed plans for achieving that goal. The bill also includes a variety of provisions covering the agencys human spaceflight, science, and other programs.

Lightfoot called out in particular the section of the bill establishing a long-term medical monitoring program for former astronauts. Something that NASA had been trying to do for a while is astronaut healthcare, he said. That monitoring, he said, was part of an ethical framework for issues associated with human missions into deep space developed for NASA by the National Academies Institute of Medicine. This is really important to us as we talk about going forward with such missions, he said.

Despite the uncertainty at NASA created by the transition to the new administration of President Donald Trump, Lightfoot said the agency was still focused on continuing its activities. We dont get paralyzed by the transition. We just continue to press forward, he said.

Lightfoot emphasized that, even though the new administration has offered few details about any changes it plans to make to NASAs activities, that he believes that the White House does support the agency. He mentioned the passing references to space in both the presidents inaugural address and one to a joint session of Congress Feb. 28.

I do remain extremely confident that we have a president and an administration that supports what were doing at NASA and wants us to succeed, he said.

Lightfoot said later that he has been working in the last few weeks to make sure NASA is aligned with administration policies. Weve been trying to integrate with the rest of the administration and their policies, so that we know what each other is doing, he said. He added he works on a daily basis with an administration appointee, senior White House adviser Erik Noble, to ensure NASAs plans are integrated with the administrations policies.

There remains uncertainty, though, about NASAs funding levels, particularly given plans announced last week by Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), that spending for non-defense discretionary spending, including NASA, would be cut by $54 billion in the administrations fiscal year 2018 budget proposal. That overall cut would offset an increase in defense spending in the budget proposal, whose outline is scheduled to be released next week.

Lightfoot declined to discuss details about the administrations budget proposal, but did say the agency had responded to the budget passback document it received from OMB outlining its plans for NASAs budget. I think we have fared fairly well, he said. I think you will see that, at the end of the day, NASA has done okay.

Others, though, are less confident about the agencys budget prospects. In a conference luncheon speech, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), a member of the Senate Commerce Committees space subcommittee, said he was concerned based on reports of severe cuts in other agencies.

We dont have any specifics for agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation yet, but based on what we know the Trump administrations push to massive cut civil discretionary spending to levels far below the draconian sequester levels that weve seen, theres little room for hope that they will fare much better in the presidents budget, he said.

Peters added that he would oppose any budget proposal that makes sharp cuts to NASA or other civil agencies. I will fight to send any proposal that rejects science, compromises our security, hurts the environment and mortgages our future straight to the garbage dump, if I can, he said, a line that triggered an impromptu round of applause from the audience.

Among agencies reportedly facing sharp cuts in the 2018 budget proposal is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A Washington Post article March 3 said that NOAAs satellite division could see its budget cut by more than 20 percent, or $500 million, in the request.

Former NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan, who was at the luncheon to receive the societys John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award, alluded to the proposed cuts in brief remarks. It is at our peril that we cut the stream of data that equips us with the environmental intelligence that is so vital to public safety and our economy today, she said.

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Lightfoot seeks stability at NASA despite budget uncertainty - SpaceNews