Plastic pollution is changing the processes of the entire Earth system, exacerbating climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land, according to scientific analysis. From a report: Plastic must not be treated as a waste problem alone, the authors said, but as a product that poses harm to ecosystems and human health. The authors gave their warning in the days before final talks begin in South Korea to agree a legally binding global treaty to cut plastic pollution. Progress towards a treaty on plastic pollution has been hindered by a row over the need to include cuts to the $712bn plastic production industry in the treaty.

At the last talks in April, developed countries were accused of bowing to pressure from fossil fuel and industry lobbyists to steer clear of any reductions in production. The discussions in South Korea, which start on 25 November, mark a rare opportunity for countries to come to an agreement to tackle the global crisis of plastic pollution. In 2022 at least 506m tonnes of plastics were produced worldwide, but only 9% gets recycled globally. The rest is burned, landfilled or dumped where it can leach into the environment. Microplastics are now everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on earth.

The new study of plastic pollution examined the mounting evidence of the effects of plastics on the environment, health and human wellbeing. The authors are urging delegates at the UN talks to stop viewing plastic pollution as merely a waste problem, and instead to tackle material flows through the whole life pathway of plastic, from raw material extraction, production and use, to its environmental release and its fate, and the Earth system effects.

Last December, Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company pursuing Elon Musk's dream of tube-based, airplane-speed travel, announced its shutdown. However, the concept itself has found a new lease on life in a scaled-down version overseas. According to The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins, "The hyperloop, in fact, lives on -- as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland." From the report: Sure, this isn't exactly the full realization of Musk's 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. Musk called it a "fifth mode of transportation" and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel. The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is being operated by a team that includes the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted "the longest" hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7km/h (25.3mph).

The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test "directly translates" to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is about the distance between Geneva and Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento, and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4mph). The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team "monitored the performance of vital subsystems," including propulsion, communication infrastructure, power electronics, and thermal management. They assessed "energy consumption, thrust variations, [linear induction motor] response, and control during acceleration, cruising, coasting, and braking scenarios."

Of course, a 1/12th-scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most of the startups and companies pursuing a full-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it still only amounts to vaporware. It's been called a "utopian vision" that would be financially impossible to achieve. But the Swiss team is undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first freight product soon, and is currently building a larger test track in the US. "This is a key step toward making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing how we connect, work, and live," he said.

SpaceX has launched the world's first wood-paneled satellite into space "to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars," reports the BBC. From the report: Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue. Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

"Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it," Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. "Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood," Prof Murata said. "A wooden satellite should be feasible, too." If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope. Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth. You can watch the launch on YouTube.

The degradation of the world's soils and landscapes is threatening human life, and must be addressed as a matter of urgency, the government of Saudi Arabia has said. The Guardian: Neglect of the land is wiping trillions of dollars from global economies, hampering agricultural production, disrupting water supplies, threatening children with poor nutrition, and destroying vital ecosystems, according to the country's deputy environment minister. Land degradation, and ways to combat the problem, will come into sharp focus at a global summit to be held in the nation's capital, Riyadh, in December.

The conference of the parties (Cop) to the UN convention on combating desertification (CCD), which takes place every two years, is often an overlooked international meeting, sparsely attended compared with the Cops on climate and on biodiversity. But as this year's host, Saudi Arabia is planning to put the issue of land management in the spotlight, inviting senior ministers and heads of government from around the world, in an attempt to bring in some financial muscle. In so doing, the country, often accused of obstructive behaviour at climate Cops, will offer an unusual glimpse of its own environmental priorities, in a world increasingly imperilled by global heating and related water shortages. Osama Faqeeha, deputy environment minister in the kingdom's government, said people should not be misled by the term desertification, which could appear a narrow concern limited to arid countries. In fact, the CCD should be understood to cover all of the globe's vulnerable lands, and efforts to rescue and protect them.

India's capital territory of Delhi is keen to use artificial rain to fight air pollution this year, its Environment Minister Gopal Rai said on Tuesday, as deteriorating air quality in the region led to an increase in respiratory illnesses. From a report: Large swathes of north India battle pollution each winter as cold air traps dust, vehicle emissions and smoke from farm fires in the breadbasket states of Punjab and Haryana, shrouding the national capital and its suburbs in a toxic haze. Cloud-seeding - the method of triggering rain by seeding clouds with salts - was considered to curb pollution in 2023 too but the plan did not materialise due to unfavourable weather conditions.

"I appeal to the federal environment minister...now in Delhi and north India, the pollution has reached the border of 400," Rai told reporters, referring to the air quality index (AQI) score on Tuesday. "The next 10 days are quite crucial...help us get permission for artificial rain, call a meeting," he said. About a third of Delhi's 39 monitoring stations showed a severe AQI score of more than 400 on Tuesday, a level which affects healthy people but is more serious for those fighting disease. An air quality score of zero to 50 is considered good.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As world leaders gathered in Colombia this week, they also watched for news from home, where many of the headlines carried the catastrophic consequences of ecological breakdown. Across the Amazon rainforest and Brazil's enormous wetlands, relentless fires had burned more than 22m hectares (55m acres). In Spain, the death toll in communities devastated by flooding passed 200. In the boreal forests that span Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, countries were recording alarming signs that their carbon sinks were collapsing under a combined weight of drought, tree death and logging. As Canada's wildfire season crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades -- behind only last year's burn, which released more carbon than some of the world's largest emitting countries.

In global negotiations, climate and nature move along two independent tracks, and for years were broadly treated as distinct challenges. But as negotiations closed at the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali on Saturday, ministers from around the world underscored the crucial importance of nature to limiting damage from global heating, and vice versa -- emphasising that climate and biodiversity could no longer be treated as independent issues if either crisis was to be resolved. Countries agreed a text on links between the climate and nature, but failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.

The UK environment secretary, Steve Reed, said that attending the summit in Colombia had brought home the links between climate and biodiversity. "One of the other things that's really struck me coming here and speaking to the Colombians in particular is how for them the nature crisis and the climate crisis are exactly the same thing. In the UK, perhaps more widely in the global north, we tend to talk a lot about climate and particularly net zero, and much less about nature -- perhaps because we're already more nature-depleted. But those two things connect entirely," he said. The Cop16 president, Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environment minister, has sought to put nature on a level with global efforts to decarbonise the world economy during the summit, warning that slashes to greenhouse gas emissions must be accompanied by the protection and restoration of the natural world if they are to be effective. Her presidency has repeatedly described nature and climate as "two sides of the same coin."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times: Los Angeles County has filed suit against the world's largest beverage companies — Coca-Cola and Pepsi — claiming the soda and drink makers lied to the public about the effectiveness of plastic recycling and, as a result, left county residents and ecosystems choking in discarded plastic... The Los Angeles County suit alleges — in a vein similar to that of [California attorney general] Bonta's suit against Exxon Mobil — that the global beverage companies misrepresented the environmental impact of their plastic bottles, "despite knowing that plastics cannot be readily disposed of without associated environmental impacts."

"Coke and Pepsi need to stop the deception and take responsibility for the plastic pollution problems" their products are causing, said Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chair Lindsey P. Horvath... Currently, just 9% of the world's plastics are recycled. The rest ends up being incinerated, sent to landfills, or discarded on the landscape, where they are often flushed into rivers or out to sea. At the same time, there is growing concern about the health and environmental consequences of microplastics — the bits of degraded plastic that slough off as the product ages, or is used, or washed. The tiny particles have been detected in every ecosystem on the planet that has been surveyed, as well as nearly every living organism examined... According to the county's statement, the two companies have consistently ranked as the world's "top plastic polluters...."

The beverage maker lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by County Counsel Dawyn R. Harrison on behalf of the people of the state of California... "The goal of this lawsuit is to stop the unfair and illegal conduct, to address the marketing practices that deceive consumers, and to force these businesses to change their practices to reduce the plastic pollution problem in the County and in California," Harrison said in a statement. "My office is committed to protecting the public from deceptive business practices and holding these companies accountable for their role in the plastic pollution crisis."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this story from SciTechDaily: New research confirms that subtle temperature differences at the ocean surface, known as the "ocean skin," increase carbon dioxide absorption. This discovery, based on precise measurements, suggests global oceans absorb 7% more CO2 than previously thought, aiding climate understanding and carbon assessments...

Until now, global estimates of air-sea CO2 fluxes typically ignore the importance of temperature differences in the near-surface layer... Dr Gavin Tilstone, from Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), said: "This discovery highlights the intricacy of the ocean's water column structure and how it can influence CO2 draw-down from the atmosphere. Understanding these subtle mechanisms is crucial as we continue to refine our climate models and predictions. It underscores the ocean's vital role in regulating the planet's carbon cycle and climate."

Somewhere off in interstellar space, 15.4 billion miles away from Earth, NASA's 47-year-old Voyager "recently went quiet," reports Mashable.

The probe "shut off its main radio transmitter for communicating with mission control..." Voyager's problem began on October 16, when flight controllers sent the robotic explorer a somewhat routine command to turn on a heater. Two days later, when NASA expected to receive a response from the spacecraft, the team learned something tripped Voyager's fault protection system, which turned off its X-band transmitter. By October 19, communication had altogether stopped.

The flight team was not optimistic. However, Voyager 1 was equipped with a backup that relies on a different, albeit significantly fainter, frequency. No one knew if the second radio transmitter could still work, given the aging spacecraft's extreme distance.

Days later, engineers with the Deep Space Network, a system of three enormous radio dish arrays on Earth, found the signal whispering back over the S-band transmitter. The device hadn't been used since 1981, according to NASA.

"The team is now working to gather information that will help them figure out what happened and return Voyager 1 to normal operations," NASA said in a recent mission update.
It's been more than 12 years since Voyager entered interstellar space, the article points out. And interstellar space "is a high-radiation environment that nothing human-made has ever flown in before.

"That means the only thing the teams running the old probes can count on are surprises."

"One technology critical to fighting climate change is lagging," reports the Washington Post, "thanks to a combination of high interest rates, rising costs, misinformation and the cycle of home construction. Adoption of heat pumps, one of the primary ways to cut emissions from buildings, has slowed in the United States and stalled in Europe, endangering the switch to clean energy.

"Heat pump investment in the United States has dropped by 4 percent in the past two years, even as sales of EVs have almost doubled, according to data from MIT and the Rhodium Group. In 13 European countries, heat pump sales dropped nearly in half in the first half of 2024, putting the European Union off-track for its climate goals." "Many many markets are falling," said Paul Kenny, the director general of the European Heat Pump Association. "It takes time to change people's minds about a heating system." Heat pumps — essentially air conditioners that can also work in reverse, heating a space as well as cooling it — are crucial to making buildings more climate-friendly. Around 60 percent of American homes are still heated with furnaces running on oil, natural gas, or even propane; to cut emissions from homes, all American houses and apartments will need to be powered by electricity...

In the United States, experts point to lags in construction, high interest rates, and general belt-tightening from inflation... [Cora Wyent, director of research for the electrification advocacy group Rewiring America] added, heat pumps are still growing as a share of overall heating systems, gaining ground on gas furnaces. In 2023, heat pumps made up 55 percent of all heating systems sold, while gas furnaces made up just 45 percent. "Heat pumps are continuing to increase their total market share," she said.

Homeowners may also run into trouble when trying to find contractors to install heat pumps. Barton James, the president and CEO of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, says many contractors don't have training on how to properly install heat pumps; if they install them incorrectly, the ensuing problems can sour consumers on the technology... In the United States, low gas prices also make the economics of heat pumps more challenging. Gas is around three times cheaper than electricity — while heat pumps make up most of that ground with efficiency, they aren't the most cost-effective option for every household.
The Post also spoke to the manager for the carbon-free buildings team at the clean energy think tank RMI. They pointed out that heating systems need to be replaced roughly every 15 years — and the next cycle doesn't start until 2035.

The article concludes that "even with government policies and subsidies, many parts of the move to clean energy will require individual people to make changes to their lives. According to the International Energy Agency, the number of heat pumps will have to triple by 2030 to stay on track with climate goals. The only way to do that, experts say, is if incentives, personal beliefs, and technology all align."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new global inventory has catalogued air pollution from space activities from 2020 to 2022. The inventory includes time, position and pollution from 446 launchers as they ascended and the tracks of re-entries as objects are heated to extreme temperatures and break up or burn up in the upper atmosphere. It catalogues the pollution from 63,000 tons of rocket propellants used in 2022 and from 3,622 objects, including rocket parts and satellites, that re-entered the atmosphere between 2020 and 2023, amounting to about 12,000 tons. [...]

Types of launch pollutants depend on the propellent but can include particles of soot and aluminum oxides as well as nitrogen oxides, chlorine and water vapour and carbon dioxide. Extreme heat on re-entry causes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen to combine to form more nitrogen oxides and also produces tiny metal-oxide particles as the objects break and burn up. Soot emitted high in the atmosphere can persist for several years, with a resulting climate warming impact that is up to 500 times greater than the same amount of soot from aviation or ground-level sources. Aluminum oxide particles, nitrogen oxides and chloride can consume the ozone in the stratosphere that protects us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. These can remain in the atmosphere for decades. Dr Connor Barker, of the UCL team, said: "Many rocket manufacturers and space agencies keep this information tightly controlled. We had to be creative about the different sources we consulted, from launch live streams on YouTube to online databases maintained by space enthusiasts in their spare time."

California signed an agreement with major airlines to increase the use of sustainable aviation fuels, aiming to reach 200 million gallons by 2035 or about 40% of the state's air travel demand. The Hill reports: The California Air Resources Board (CARB) and Airlines for America (A4A) -- an industry trade group representing almost a dozen airlines -- pledged to increase the availability of sustainable aviation fuels statewide. Sustainable aviation fuels -- lower-carbon alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuels -- are typically made from nonpetroleum feedstocks, such as biomass or waste. At a San Francisco International Airport ceremony Wednesday, the partners committed (PDF) to using 200 million gallons of such fuels by 2035 -- an amount estimated to meet about 40 percent of travel demand within the state at that point, according to CARB. That quantity also represents a more than tenfold increase from current usage levels of these fuels, the agency added.

Among A4A member airlines are Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Atlas Air Worldwide, Delta Air Lines, FedEx, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and UPS, while Air Canada is an associate member. To achieve the 2035 goals, CARB and A4A said they plan to work together to identify, assess and prioritize necessary policy measures, such as incentivizing relevant investments and streamlining the permitting processes. A Sustainable Aviation Fuel Working Group, which will include government and industry stakeholders, will meet annually to both discuss progress and address barriers toward meeting these goals, the partners added. A public website will display updated information about the availability and use of conventional and sustainable fuels across California, while also providing details about state policies, according to the agreement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than 500 Amazon workers reportedly signed a letter to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) CEO this week, sharing their outrage over Amazon's upcoming return-to-office (RTO) policy that will force workers into offices five days per week. In September, Amazon announced that starting in 2025, workers will no longer be allowed to work remotely twice a week. At the time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the move would make it easier for workers "to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture." Reuters reported today that it viewed a letter from a swath of workers sent to AWS chief Matt Garman on Wednesday regarding claims he reportedly made during an all-hands meeting this month. Garman reportedly told attendees that 9 out of 10 employees he spoke with support the five-day in-office work policy. The letter called the statements "inconsistent with the experiences of many employees" and "misrepresenting the realities of working at Amazon," Reuters reported. "We were appalled to hear the non-data-driven explanation you gave for Amazon imposing a five-day in-office mandate,'" the letter reportedly stated. [...]

In the letter, hundreds of Amazon workers reportedly lamented what they believe was a lack of third-party data shared in making the RTO policy. It said that Garman's statements "break the trust of your employees who have not only personal experience that shows the benefits of remote work but have seen the extensive data which supports that experience." The letter included stories from 12 anonymous employees about medical, familial, and other challenges that the new RTO policy could create. The letter also reportedly pointed out the obstacles that a five-day in-office work policy has on groups of protected workers, like those providing childcare. The new policy will not align with Amazon's "'Strive to be Earth's Best Employer' leadership principle,'" the letter said. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that Amazon's benefits include commuter benefits, elder care, and subsidized parking fees.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Behind the Black: According to a new very detailed engineering analysis into the causes of the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020, the failure was caused first by a surprising interaction between the radio electronics of Arecibo and the traditional methods used to anchor the cables, and second by a failure of inspections to spot the problem as it became obvious.

The surprising engineering discovery is illustrated [here (PNG)]. The main antenna of Arecibo was suspended above the bowl below by three main cables. The figure shows the basic design of the system used to anchor the cable ends to their sockets. The end of the cable bunches would be inserted into the socket, spread apart, and then zinc would be poured in to fill the gap and then act as a plug and glue to hold the cables in place. According to the report, this system has been used for decades in many applications very successfully.

What the report found however was at Arecibo over time the cable bunch and zinc plug slowly began to pull out of the socket, what the report labels as "zinc creep." This was noted by inspectors, but dismissed as a concern because they still believed the engineering margins were still high enough to prevent failure at this point. In fact, this is exactly where the structure failed in 2020, with the first cable separating as shown in August 2020. The second cable did so in a similar manner in November 2020.

The report concluded that the "only hypothesis the committee could develop that provides a plausible but unprovable answer to all these questions and the observed socket failure pattern is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope's uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment. The Arecibo Telescope cables were suspended across the beam of 'the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth.'"

Heat-related deaths, food insecurity and the spread of infectious diseases caused by the climate crisis have reached record levels, according to a landmark report. The Guardian: The Lancet Countdown's ninth report on health and the climate breakdown reveals that people across the world face unprecedented threats to their health from the rapidly changing climate. "This year's stocktake of the imminent health threats of climate inaction reveals the most concerning findings yet," warned Dr Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown at University College London.

"Once again, last year broke climate change records with extreme heatwaves, deadly weather events, and devastating wildfires affecting people around the world. No individual or economy on the planet is immune [to] the health threats of climate change. The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts, and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far and put a healthy future further out of reach."

The report finds that in 2023, extreme drought lasting at least one month affected 48% of the global land area, while people had to cope with an unprecedented 50 more days of health-threatening temperatures than would have been expected without the climate crisis. As a result, 151 million more people faced moderate or severe food insecurity, risking malnutrition and other harm to their health.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the European Space Agency: White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background (PNG). This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort. On June 7, 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project 'A Sign in Space.' After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.

US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open. Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.

The concentration of planet-heating pollutants clogging the atmosphere hit record levels in 2023, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said. From a report: It found carbon dioxide is accumulating faster than at any time in human history, with concentrations having risen by more than 10% in just two decades. "Another year, another record," said Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the WMO. "This should set alarm bells ringing among decision makers." The increase was driven by humanity's "stubbornly high" burning of fossil fuels, the WMO found, and made worse by big wildfires and a possible drop in the ability of trees to absorb carbon. The concentration of CO2 reached 420 parts per million (ppm) in 2023, the scientists observed. The level of pollution is 51% greater than before the Industrial Revolution, when people began to burn large amounts of coal, oil and fossil gas.

Ars Technica's Stephen Clark reports: For those who follow NASA's human spaceflight program, a burning question for the last year-and-a-half has been what caused the Orion spacecraft's heat shield to crack and chip away during atmospheric reentry on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in late 2022. Multiple NASA officials said Monday they now know the answer, but they're not telling. Instead, agency officials want to wait until more reviews are done to determine what this means for Artemis II, the Orion spacecraft's first crew mission around the Moon, officially scheduled for launch in September 2025.

"We have gotten to a root cause," said Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA's Moon to Mars program office, in response to a question from Ars on Monday at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium. "We are having conversations within the agency to make sure that we have a good understanding of not only what's going on with the heat shield, but also next steps and how that actually applies to the course that we take for Artemis II," she said. "And we'll be in a position to be able to share where we are with that hopefully before the end of the year."

While the space program is far down the list of most voters' priorities, this means a decision and announcement on what will happen with Artemis II won't come until the post-election lame duck period in the waning weeks of the Biden administration, and likely Bill Nelson's tenure as NASA administrator. This is several months later than NASA officials expected to make a decision. The question here is whether NASA managers decide it is safe enough to fly the Orion heat shield as-is on Artemis II, or if it is too risky with people onboard. Artemis II will be a 10-day mission taking its four-person crew on a path around the far side of the Moon, then back to Earth. This will be the first time people travel to such distances since the Apollo program ended more than 50 years ago.

When SpaceX developed reusable boosters for its Falcon rockets, it helped cut costs of launches.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that last week's first-time catch of "its huge Starship booster" could "extend SpaceX's cost advantages, especially in launches to low-Earth orbit, where SpaceX and others operate satellites." A fully and rapidly reusable Starship would push down SpaceX's costs by limiting the need to crank out new hardware and cutting downtime between flights, space industry executives say. Bain, the consulting firm, has estimated that Starship would reduce the cost of getting each kilogram to low-Earth orbit by 50 to 80 times... SpaceX's rocket peers are moving toward reusability, but they are behind the progress Musk's company has made.

- The huge booster that will power New Glenn, the orbital rocket Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is developing, is designed to be reusable. That rocket is slated to launch for the first time next month.

- ULA, the rocket operator owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is looking to recover the two engines that help power the first part of its new rocket, Vulcan Centaur. The parent company for Arianespace, whose new vehicle is powered by an expendable booster, has also invested in a startup developing a reusable booster.

- Last year, Rocket Lab USA used an engine that had flown before on a flight of its Electron rocket, and is working on a new vehicle, called Neutron, with a booster it could use again.

- Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said the reusable vehicle the Texas-based company is developing with Northrop Grumman would give launch customers more flexibility and better pricing. "It really comes down to the affordability and the schedule," Kim said in a recent interview.
"We need reusability for rockets, just like we have reusability for cars, for airplanes, for bicycles, for horses," Musk said in a video SpaceX posted earlier this year...

In Iceland, "a volcanic system has awoken after an 800-year slumber," according to a multimedia CNN Special Report. "But in another part of Iceland, scientists and engineers are hoping to harness magma's immense power to solve the planet's biggest problem..."

It all started in 2009 when Bjarni Pálsson, an engineer with Iceland's national power company, accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. "Armed with new technology and know-how, he is going back in..." The ambition of the geothermal experts and volcanologists that comprise the Krafla Magma Testbed is to convert the immense heat and pressure into a new "limitless" form of supercharged geothermal energy — a tantalizing prospect as the world struggles to end its relationship with planet-heating fossil fuels. "This has never been done before," said Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, director of the Geothermal Research Cluster, which developed the project....

If all goes to plan, the first borehole will be completed in 2027 and will mark the first time anyone has ever implanted sensors directly into a magma chamber... If the first drilling experiment succeeds, the team will move onto the second borehole, due to be completed in 2029 — and this could be the global gamechanger. It's here the team will attempt to harness the intense heat of magma to produce a new kind of extreme geothermal energy, many times more powerful than conventional...

If they succeed, the implications could reverberate around the world, Ingólfsson said. There are an estimated 800 million people living within roughly 60 miles of an active volcano.
The report includes a map showing volcano sites around the earth where similar drilling could theoretically unleash the same intense magma-powered extreme geothermal energy.

Iceland's plan is to drill down 1.2 miles — about 2 kilometers — into a magma chamber that's around 1,800 Fahrenheit (nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius). The engineering feat "won't be easy," the article acknowledges. "But as humans heat the planet at record speed with fossil fuel pollution, there is increasing pressure to perform moonshot feats of engineering to save us from ourselves."