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Transportation

68-Year-Old Uses AirTag (and Twitter) to Find the Bike His Airline Lost (cnn.com) 9

An anonymous reader shared this story from CNN: Barry Sherry was traveling from his home in Virginia to Europe for the cycling trip of a lifetime: a week riding through the Swiss Alps, followed by another in Luxembourg, where his cycling group was riding with two former Tour de France competitors, and then a third week cycling in Finland with friends. It was, he says, to be his last cycling trip to Europe. "I'm 68 — I'm getting old," he says... While his suitcase arrived on the carousel, his [$8,000] bike — zipped up in its carrier — had become one of the 7.6 out of every 1,000 items of luggage to be, as the industry coyly terms it, "mishandled." In other words: lost...

The "Find My" app, which traces Apple devices including AirTags, showed the bike at Heathrow... British Airways has up to six flights per day from Heathrow to Zurich, but as each day came and went, none of them had Sherry's bike on board... Each day, he updated his location on the British Airways website, and each day, his bike failed to arrive — or move from Heathrow, according to the AirTag. By this point Sherry was tweeting the airline daily, showing them screenshots of the mapped location of the bike, but getting generic responses from British Airways that he believes were bots... That evening, he tweeted the location of the bag again, tagging American Airlines (who'd sold him the ticket) and Heathrow Airport, too. "AA seemed to have a human at the other end, and I thought maybe they could reach a human at BA," he says.

Was it that final tweet, tagging AA and Heathrow, that did it? Sherry will never know — though he suspects the daily tweets showing screenshots of the bike's location were the key. After his tweet on Thursday night to all three accounts, on Friday morning he checked his Find My app, and saw his bike was on the move... "Had I not started an annoying Twitter campaign, I do think it would have remained at Heathrow until I could have talked to someone face to face."

CNN reports that Sherry's week in Luxembourg "went ahead as planned, with Sherry adding that he was particuarly attached to his bike because "Fourteen years ago I was diagnosed with cancer, and the only time I wasn't thinking about it was when I was riding my bike."

He'd put the AirTag with his bike "after hearing other cyclists rave about them."
Movies

Documentary on Hungary's Videogames Behind the Iron Curtain Crowdfunds Expanded Disks (crowdfundr.com) 1

A documentary series by Moleman Films reached its 5th episode, a 144-minute film about "the golden age of Hungarian video gaming and the formation of the Hungarian demoscene in the 80s and 90s." You can watch this episode on YouTube (and English subtitles can be selected). From Commodore 64s smuggled across the Iron Curtain to cracked games on cassette tapes sold at flea markets, floppy disk swapping via postal mail, hacked phone booths connected to U.S. BBSes, and copy parties packed to capacity, Stamps Back tells the story of how teenagers in Hungary ignited a computing revolution in the 1980s with illegally copied video games from the West, and began the Hungarian demoscene.
But the filmmakers say "We received a lot of feedback that you would like to see the full-length interviews...in a physical special edition." So they've launched a campaign on Crowdfundr: More than 76 hours of interviews [with 59 people] were conducted for the film, which is a true document of the Hungarian home computer life in the 1980s and 1990s. You can now get this 76-hour material with English subtitles together with the film in a special Blu-Ray edition + downloadable image file format...

If we reach the stretch goal, a 4th disc will be added to the edition, which will contain a selection of the best Hungarian intros and demos of the past 40 years in video format.

The film's web site includes links to (and information on) their four previous documentaries:
  • The Truth Lies Down Under, about the alternative subcultures Budapest
  • Demoscene: The Art of the Algorithms. A 2012 look at "a digital subculture where artists don't use always the latest technology" but "bring out the best from 30 year-old computer technics."
  • Journey to the Surface. How the internet and digital technology reshaped the music industry for outside-the-mainstream genres including beatbox, turntablism, DJing, live improvisation, and bedroom producers.
  • Longplay — the story of Hungarian video game development behind the Iron Curtain, and how dedicated developers "outfoxed Nintendo, tricked SEGA," and "dodged the limelight and led the world from behind the Iron Curtain."

Thanks to Slashdot reader lameron for sharing the story.


Space

Webb Telescope Spots Water (Vapor) in a Nearby Planetary System (cnn.com) 11

"Astronomers have detected water vapor swirling close to a nearby star," reports CNN, "indicating that the planets forming around it might someday be able to support life." The young planetary system, known as PDS 70, is 370 light-years away... Circling it are two known gas giant planets, and researchers recently determined that one of them, PDS 70b, may share its orbit with a third "sibling" planet that is forming there...

Two different disks of gas and dust — the ingredients necessary to form both stars and planets — surround the star. The inner and outer disks are separated by a gap spanning 5 billion miles (8 billion kilometers). The gas giants are in the gap, where they orbit the star. The Webb telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument detected the signature of water vapor in the inner disk, less than 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the star. Astronomers believe that inner disk is where small, rocky planets similar to those in our solar system could form if PDS 70 is anything like our solar system...

"We've seen water in other disks, but not so close in and in a system where planets are currently assembling. We couldn't make this type of measurement before Webb," said lead study author Giulia Perotti, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, in a statement... No planets have been found forming in the inner disk, but all the ingredients necessary have been detected. The presence of water vapor suggests the planets could contain water in some form. Only time will tell whether the planets form — and if they are potentially habitable for life.

Power

US Energy Dept Pledges $100M to Buy Products Derived from Converted Carbon Emissions (energy.gov) 17

This week America's Department of Energy announced $100 million to support states, local governments, and public utilities "in purchasing products derived from converted carbon emissions."

The hope is to jumpstart the creation of a market for "environmentally sustainable alternatives in fuels, chemicals, and building products sourced from captured emissions from industrial and power generation facilities." U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says it will "help transform harmful pollutants into beneficial products." "State and local grants, made possible through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will help demonstrate the economic viability of innovative technologies, resulting in huge net reductions in lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, while bringing new, good-paying jobs and cleaner air to communities nationwide." States, local governments, and public utilities purchase large quantities of products, therefore providing an incentive to purchase products made from carbon emissions is an important method to drive emissions reductions...

[T]he Carbon Utilization Procurement Grants program will help offset 50% of the costs to states, local governments, and public utilities or agencies to procure and use products developed through the conversion of captured carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide emissions. The commercial or industrial products to be procured and used under these grants must demonstrate a significant net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to incumbent products via a life cycle analysis...

Projects selected under this opportunity will be required to develop and implement strategies to ensure strong community and worker benefits, and report on such activities and outcomes.

Power

How a Screwdriver Slip Caused a Fatal 1946 Atomic Accident (bbc.com) 31

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A specially illustrated BBC story created by artist/writer Ben Platts-Mills tells the remarkable story of how a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist in 1946.

"Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test," Platts-Mills writes, "a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life. In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the "critical assembly". During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later."

In an interesting follow-up story, Platts-Mills explains how he pieced together what happened inside the room where 'The Blue Flash' occurred (it has been observed that many criticality accidents emit a blue flash of light).

15 years later there were more fatalities at a nuclear power plant after the Atomic Energy Commission opened the National Reactor Testing Station in a desert west of Idaho Falls, according to Wikipedia: The event occurred at an experimental U.S. Army plant known as the Argonne Low-Power Reactor, which the Army called the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1)... Three trained military men had been working inside the reactor room when a mistake was made while reattaching a control rod to its motor assembly. With the central control rod nearly fully extended, the nuclear reactor rated at 3 MW rapidly increased power to 20 GW. This rapidly boiled the water inside the core.

As the steam expanded, a pressure wave of water forcefully struck the top of the reactor vessel, upon which two of the men stood. The explosion was so severe that the reactor vessel was propelled nine feet into the air, striking the ceiling before settling back into its original position. One man was impaled by a shield plug and lodged into the ceiling, where he died instantly. The other men died from their injuries within hours. The three men were buried in lead coffins, and that entire section of the site was buried.

"The core meltdown caused no damage to the area, although some radioactive nuclear fission products were released into the atmosphere."

This week Idaho Falls became one of the sites re-purposed for possible utility-scale clean energy projects as part of America's "Cleanup to Clean Energy" initiative.
IBM

The IBM Mainframe: How It Runs and Why It Survives (arstechnica.com) 65

Slashdot reader AndrewZX quotes Ars Technica: Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they're dinosaurs, they're T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.

It's estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They're used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.

In this explainer, we'll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it's still going strong after over 50 years.

"Todayâ(TM)s mainframe can have up to 240 server-grade CPUs, 40TB of error-correcting RAM, and many petabytes of redundant flash-based secondary storage. Theyâ(TM)re designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptimeâ"thatâ(TM)s a bit over five minutes' worth of outage per year..."

"RAM, CPUs, and disks are all hot-swappable, so if a component fails, it can be pulled and replaced without requiring the mainframe to be powered down."
Security

Could NIST Delays Push Post-Quantum Security Products Into the Next Decade? (esecurityplanet.com) 32

Slashdot reader storagedude writes: A quantum computer capable of breaking public-key encryption is likely years away. Unfortunately, so are products that support post-quantum cryptography.

That's the conclusion of an eSecurity Planet article by Henry Newman. With the second round of NIST's post-quantum algorithm evaluations — announced last week — expected to take "several years" and the FIPS product validation process backed up, Newman notes that it will be some time before products based on post-quantum standards become available.

"The delay in developing quantum-resistant algorithms is especially troubling given the time it will take to get those products to market," Newman writes. "It generally takes four to six years with a new standard for a vendor to develop an ASIC to implement the standard, and it then takes time for the vendor to get the product validated, which seems to be taking a troubling amount of time.

"I am not sure that NIST is up to the dual challenge of getting the algorithms out and products validated so that vendors can have products that are available before quantum computers can break current technology. There is a race between quantum technology and NIST vetting algorithms, and at the moment the outcome is looking worrisome."

And as encrypted data stolen now can be decrypted later, the potential for "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks "is a quantum computing security problem that's already here."

GNU is Not Unix

Libreboot Creator Says After Coding a Fork for 'GNU Boot Project', FSF Sent a Cease-and-Desist Letter Over Its Name (libreboot.org) 83

Libreboot is a distribution of coreboot "aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS firmware contained by most computers," according to Wikipedia. It was briefly part of the GNU project, until maintainer Leah Rowe and the GNU project agreed to part ways in 2017.

But here in 2023, the GNU project has created a fork of Libreboot named GNU Boot... The GNU Boot fork "currently does not have a website and does not have any releases of its own," points out Libreboot's Leah Rowe, adding "My intent is to help them, and they are free — encouraged — to re-use my work... " But things have gotten messy, writes Rowe: They forked Libreboot, due to disagreement with Libreboot's Binary Blob Reduction Policy. This is a pragmatic policy, enacted in November 2022, to increase the number of coreboot users by increasing the amount of hardware supported in Libreboot... I wish GNU Boot all the best success. Truly. Although I think their project is entirely misguided (for reasons explained by modern Libreboot policy), I do think there is value in it. It provides continuity for those who wish to use something resembling the old Libreboot project...

When GNU Boot first launched, as a failed hostile fork of Libreboot under the same name, I observed: their code repository was based on Libreboot from late 2022, and their website based on Libreboot in late 2021. Their same-named Libreboot site was announced during LibrePlanet 2023... [N]ow they are calling themselves GNU Boot, and it is indeed GNU, but it still has the same problem as of today: still based on very old Libreboot, and they don't even have a website. According to [the FSF's Savannah software repository], GNU Boot was created on 11 June 2023. Yet no real development, in over a month since then...

I've decided that I want to help them... I decided recently that I'd simply make a release for them, exactly to their specifications (GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines), talking favourably about FSF/GNU, and so on. I'm in a position to do it (thus scratching the itch), so why not? I did this release for them — it's designated non-GeNUine Boot 20230717, and I encourage them to re-use this in their project, to get off the ground. This completely leapfrogs their current development; it's months ahead. Months. It's 8 months ahead, since their current revision is based upon Libreboot from around ~October 2022...

The GNU Boot people actually sent me a cease and desist email, citing trademark infringement. Amazing...

I complied with their polite request and have renamed the project to non-GeNUine Boot. The release archive was re-compiled, under this new brand name and the website was re-written accordingly. Personally, I like the new name better.

AMD

AMD 'Zenbleed' Bug Leaks Data From Zen 2 Ryzen, EPYC CPUs (tomshardware.com) 30

Monday a researcher with Google Information Security posted about a new vulnerability he independently found in AMD's Zen 2 processors. Tom's Hardware reports: The 'Zenbleed' vulnerability spans the entire Zen 2 product stack, including AMD's EPYC data center processors and the Ryzen 3000/4000/5000 CPUs, allowing the theft of protected information from the CPU, such as encryption keys and user logins. The attack does not require physical access to the computer or server and can even be executed via JavaScript on a webpage...

AMD added the AMD-SB-7008 Bulletin several hours later. AMD has patches ready for its EPYC 7002 'Rome' processors now, but it will not patch its consumer Zen 2 Ryzen 3000, 4000, and some 5000-series chips until November and December of this year... AMD hasn't given specific details of any performance impacts but did issue the following statement to Tom's Hardware: "Any performance impact will vary depending on workload and system configuration. AMD is not aware of any known exploit of the described vulnerability outside the research environment..."

AMD describes the exploit much more simply, saying, "Under specific microarchitectural circumstances, a register in "Zen 2" CPUs may not be written to 0 correctly. This may cause data from another process and/or thread to be stored in the YMM register, which may allow an attacker to potentially access sensitive information."

The article includes a list of the impacted processors with a schedule for the release of the updated firmware to OEMs.

The Google Information Security researcher who discovered the bug is sharing research on different CPU behaviors, and says the bug can be patched through software on multiple operating systems (e.g., "you can set the chicken bit DE_CFG[9]") — but this might result in a performance penalty.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader waspleg for sharing the news.
Social Networks

Reddit Users Heckle Search for New Mods, as Some Mods Move to Lemmy and Discord (arstechnica.com) 67

"Over the past week, a Reddit employee has posted to subreddits with ousted mods, asking for new volunteers," reports Ars Technica.

But it's not always going smoothly... A Reddit employee going by ModCodeofConduct (Reddit has refused to disclose the real names of admins representing the company on the platform) has posted to numerous subreddits over recent days, including r/IRLEasterEggs, r/donthelpjustfilm, r/ActLikeYouBelong, r/malefashionadvice, and r/AccidentalRenaissance... Like most official Reddit posts since the API war began, the comments under the job ads display users' discontent.

"May I nominate a mod? I think u/ConspirOC would be a great mod, as he created this subreddit and has successfully run it for years, before you forcibly removed him," a user going by LittleManOnACan wrote on ModCodeofConduct's post seeking replacement r/IRLEasterEggs mods. "Additionally, fire Steve Huffman (Fuck u/Spez)."

There's also a desire among Reddit users for a return to not just how things were but an acknowledgment of the efforts made by many previous moderators, how things changed, and why things are different now. A Redditor going by QuicklyThisWay wrote on ModCodeofConduct's post for news mods for r/IRLEasterEggs:

"Just to be clear for anyone 'applying' to be a moderator. The user that created the subreddit and any other mods were removed by admins for making the community private. Even though the option to change to private is available to all subreddits at any time, the admins have not and will not respect any 'autonomy' moderators appear to have...

As Ars has previously detailed, user protests didn't prevent third-party Reddit apps from closing. However, they have disrupted the platform.

Reddit didn't answer questions Ars sent about its replacement mod criteria or how it'll help ensure new mods can properly handle their newfound volunteer duties...

"mods Ars has spoken with over the weeks have frequently pointed to the potential for burnout, death threats, long training sessions (from other volunteer mods), and rapid turnover for Reddit mods..." the article notes, adding "Without mods proven to be dedicated and experienced, it's unclear how fervently such efforts will continue in the future...

"Disgruntled mods and ex-mods continue seeking new platforms to continue community discussions, including Lemmy and Discord. And as of this writing, there are still 1,900 subreddits private, per the Reddark_247 tracker."

Meanwhile, the third annual edition of Reddit's annual pixel-placing event r/Place "turned into a battleground for dunking on the CEO," reports Polygon. A Reddit spokesperson declined to comment about this year's edition of r/Place, telling Polygon via email "redditors are going to reddit."
Gizmodo's article includes a timelapse video (from YouTube) that they say captures "the whimsy — and anger — of its users," including "plenty of protest art directed at CEO Steve Huffman, who goes by u/spez on the platform..." While there are plenty of examples of "Fuck Spez" to go around, the most creative moment occurred at the end of the project. As r/Place wound to a close, users were able to place a pixel once every thirty seconds, but the pixel had to be white — an effort to wipe the slate clean. However, in the final moments of the project, users collaborated to leave one massive "FUCK SPEZ" across the canvas.
Power

America Will Convert Land from Its Nuclear Weapons Program into Clean Energy Projects (energy.gov) 71

Friday America's Department of Energy announced plans to re-purpose some of the land it owns — "portions of which were previously used in the nation's nuclear weapons program" — for generating clean energy. They'll be leasing them out for "utility-scale clean energy projects" in an initiative called "Cleanup to Clean Energy."

The agency has identified 70,000 acres for potential development, in New Mexico, Nevada, South Carolina, Idaho, and Washington: "We are going to transform the lands we have used over decades for nuclear security and environmental remediation by working closely with tribes and local communities together with partners in the private sector to build some of the largest clean energy projects in the world," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "Through the Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative, the Department of Energy will leverage areas that were previously used to protect our national security and will repurpose them to the same end — this time, generating clean energy that will help save the planet and protect our energy independence."
The announcement notes that in December 2021, President Biden directed U.S. federal agencies to "authorize use of their real property assets, including land for the development of new clean electricity generation and storage through leases, grants, permits, or other mechanisms."

"As the leading Federal agency on clean energy research and development, DOE has both a unique opportunity and a clear responsibility to lead by example and identify creative solutions to achieve the President's mandate."
Science

Many Physicists 'Skeptical' of Spectacular Superconductor Claims (science.org) 70

"This week, social media has been aflutter over a claim for a new superconductor that works not only well above room temperatures, but also at ambient pressure," writes Science magazine. If true, the discovery would be one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics and could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids. However, the two related papers, posted to the arXiv preprint server by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea's Quantum Energy Research Centre and colleagues on 22 July, are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical... "They come off as real amateurs," says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They don't know much about superconductivity and the way they've presented some of the data is fishy." On the other hand, he says, researchers at Argonne and elsewhere are already trying to replicate the experiment. "People here are taking it seriously and trying to grow this stuff." Nadya Mason, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign says, "I appreciate that the authors took appropriate data and were clear about their fabrication techniques." Still, she cautions, "The data seems a bit sloppy...."

What are the reasons for skepticism? There are several, Norman says. First, the undoped material, lead apatite, isn't a metal but rather a nonconducting mineral. And that's an unpromising starting point for making a superconductor. What's more, lead and copper atoms have similar electronic structures, so substituting copper atoms for some of the lead atoms shouldn't greatly affect the electrical properties of the material, Norman says. "You have a rock, and you should still end up with a rock." On top of that, lead atoms are very heavy, which should suppress the vibrations and make it harder for electrons to pair, Norman explains.

The papers don't provide a solid explanation of the physics at play. But the researchers speculate that within their material, the doping slightly distorts long, naturally occurring chains of lead atoms... [Mason] notes that Lee and Kim also suggest that a kind of undulation of charge might exist in the chains and that similar charge patterns have been seen in high-temperature superconductors. "Maybe this material really just hits the sweet spot of a strongly interacting unconventional superconductor," she says.

The big question will be whether anybody can reproduce the observations...

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.
Cloud

Building a Better Server? Oxide Computer Ships Its First Rack (thenewstack.io) 27

Oxide Computer Company spent four years working toward "The power of the cloud in your data center... bringing hyperscaler agility to the mainstream enterprise." And on June 30, Oxide finally shipped its very first server rack.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares this report: It's the culmination of years of work — to fulfill a long-standing dream. In December of 2019, Oxide co-founder Jess Frazelle had written a blog post remembering conversations over the year with people who'd been running their own workloads on-premises... "Hyperscalers like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have what I like to call 'infrastructure privilege' since they long ago decided they could build their own hardware and software to fulfill their needs better than commodity vendors. We are working to bring that same infrastructure privilege to everyone else!"

Frazelle had seen a chance to make an impact with "better integration between the hardware and software stacks, better power distribution, and better density. It's even better for the environment due to the energy consumption wins."

Oxide CTO Bryan Cantrill sees real problems in the proprietary firmware that sits between hardware and system software — so Oxide's server eliminates the BIOS and UEFI altogether, and replaces the hardware-managing baseboard management controller (or BMC) with "a proper service processor." They even wrote their own custom, all-Rust operating system (named Hubris). On the Software Engineering Daily podcast, Cantrill says "These things boot like a rocket."

And it's all open source. "Everything we do is out there for people to see and understand..." Cantrill added. On the Changelog podcast Cantrill assessed its significance. "I don't necessarily view it as a revolution in its own right, so much as it is bringing the open source revolution to firmware."

Oxide's early funders include 92-year-old Pierre Lamond (who hired Andy Grove at Fairchild Semiconductor) — and customers who supported their vision. On Software Engineering Daily's podcast Cantrill points out that "If you're going to use a lot of compute, you actually don't want to rent it — you want to own it."
Power

Seven Major Automakers Plan 30,000 More High-Speed Chargers in North America by 2030 (theverge.com) 60

"A new group of automotive super friends is banding together," reports the Verge, "promising to build the next big North American electric vehicle charging network." These worldwide automakers — BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis — announced a planned joint venture Wednesday to erect easy-to-activate DC fast chargers along US and Canadian highways and in urban environments.

The grand plan for the currently unnamed partnership is to install "at least" 30,000 high-speed EV chargers by 2030, with the first ones to open summer 2024 in the US. The collective plans to leverage National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funding in the US and will also use other private and public funding from state and federal sources to build out the network... The new stations will connect and charge EV models made by the partnered automakers without having to fumble with another charging station app. The companies also plan to integrate the developing "Plug and Charge" standard that the Federal Highway Administration is attempting to standardize... All stations will include the standardized Tesla North American Charging Standard (NACS) ports and also the current widely used Combined Charging System (CCS) plugs.

"The new joint venture is also planned to be entirely powered by renewable energy," the article adds.

But "It's not known if renewable energy will directly power them or if the companies plan to buy credits like Rivian announced Tuesday."
Moon

NASA Funds Moon Projects to Help Astronauts 'Live off the Land' (msn.com) 22

"NASA took a significant step Tuesday toward allowing humans on the moon to 'live off the land,'" reports the Washington Post.

NASA awarded several contracts "to build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy, and even lay a high-voltage power line over half a mile..." Instead of going to the moon and returning home, as was done during the Apollo era of the 1960s and early '70s, NASA intends to build a sustainable presence focusing on the lunar South Pole, where there is water in the form of ice. The contracts awarded Tuesday are some of the first steps the agency is taking toward developing the technologies that would allow humans to live for extended periods of time on the moon and in deep space. Materials on the moon must be used to extract the necessities such as water, fuel and metal for construction, said Prasun Desai, NASA's acting associate administrator for space technology. "We're trying to start that technology development to make that a reality in the future," he said.

The largest award, $34.7 million, went to billionaire Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin space venture, which has been working on a project since 2021 called Blue Alchemist to build solar cells and transmission wire out of the moon's regolith — rocks and dirt. In a blog post this year, Blue Origin said it developed a reactor that reaches temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees and uses an electrical current to separate iron, silicon and aluminum from oxygen in the regolith. The testing, using a lunar regolith simulant, has created silicon pure enough to make solar cells to be used on the lunar surface, the company said. [NASA says it could also be used to make wires.] The oxygen could be used for humans to breathe. "To make long-term presence on the moon viable, we need abundant electrical power," the company wrote in the post. "We can make power systems on the moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth."

The award is another indication that Blue Origin is trying to position itself as a key player in helping NASA build a permanent presence on and around the moon as part of the Artemis program... The company said it is developing a solar-powered storage tank to keep propellants at 20 degrees Kelvin, or about minus-423 degrees Fahrenheit, so spacecraft can refuel in space instead of returning to Earth between missions.

Other winners cited in the article:
  • Zeno Power, which "intends to use nuclear energy to provide power on the moon," received a $15 million contract (partnering with Blue Origin).
  • Astrobotic — which plans to launch a lander to the moon this year — got a $34.6 million contract "to build a power line that would transmit electricity from a lunar lander's solar arrays to a rover. It ultimately intends to build a larger power source using solar arrays on the moon's surface."
  • Redwire won a $12.9 million contract "to help build roads and landing pads on the moon. It would use a microwave emitter to melt the regolith and transform treacherous rocky landscapes into smooth, solid surfaces, said Mike Gold, Redwire's chief growth officer."

The technologies — which include in-space 3D printing — "will expand industry capabilities for a sustained human presence on the Moon," NASA said in a statement.

The U.S. space agency will contribute a total of $150 million, with each company contributing at least 10-25% of the total cost (based on their size). "Partnering with the commercial space industry lets us at NASA harness the strength of American innovation and ingenuity," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The technologies that NASA is investing in today have the potential to be the foundation of future exploration."

"Our partnerships with industry could be a cornerstone of humanity's return to the Moon under Artemis," said acting associate administrator Desai. "By creating new opportunities for streamlined awards, we hope to push crucial technologies over the finish line so they can be used in future missions.

"These innovative partnerships will help advance capabilities that will enable sustainable exploration on the Moon."


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