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    Trump Has Options to Punish Musk Even if His Federal Contracts Continue

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    The president could tighten federal oversight of the tech titan’s businesses, even if heavy reliance by the Pentagon and NASA on them makes terminating Mr. Musk’s contracts less feasible.After the relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk exploded into warfare Thursday, Mr. Trump suggested that he might eliminate the tech titan’s federal contracts.“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it,” Mr. Trump posted on his social media platform.That’s not as easy as Mr. Trump implies. The Pentagon and NASA remain intensely reliant on SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket launch and space-based communications company, to get to orbit and move government data across the world.But there are options available to the president that could make Mr. Musk’s relationship with the federal government much more difficult than it has been so far in Mr. Trump’s second administration.Mr. Trump’s most accessible weapon to punish Mr. Musk is the ability to instruct federal regulators to intensify oversight of his business operations, reversing a slowdown in regulatory actions that benefited Mr. Musk’s businesses after Mr. Trump was elected.“In an administration that has defined itself by reducing regulation and oversight, it would not be difficult to selectively ramp up oversight again,” said Steven L. Schooner, a former White House contracts lawyer who is now a professor at George Washington University.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      If Elon Musk and Donald Trump Make Up, Don’t Be Surprised

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      For all the insults that Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump traded on Thursday, don’t be surprised if they make up again days from now. In the meantime, they both benefit.Elon Musk was once known for doing things. The entrepreneur reached a new peak of fame on Thursday for saying things. It was mostly bad things about President Trump.The spat was revelatory, it was epic, it was historic, at least according to the thousands of earnest and excited commentaries that were instantly published.It was also a well-timed outburst.Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump did not have a feud five days ago and might not have a feud five days from now. Until proven otherwise, all of this is theater. Think of it as the political version of professional wrestling. For a few hours, everyone was diverted by the spectacle of a brawl between the world’s richest man and its most powerful person.Mr. Trump took a break from tariffs and deportations. For Mr. Musk, the episode was even more valuable. His wealth comes from the promise that Tesla, his electric car company, will own a significant slice of the self-driving future. The launch of Tesla’s robotaxi business is next week in Austin. Skepticism abounds. The more attention it gets, the bigger a disappointment it could be.Mr. Musk’s SpaceX business is even more problematic. For all its promise to set up colonies on Mars, it is having trouble with the basics. The ninth flight test of SpaceX’s Starship program a few days ago saw both the reusable booster exploding and, 40 minutes later, the rocket itself blowing up. It wasn’t the first such failure either.SpaceX, which is owned by Mr. Musk, left, is having trouble with the basics of spaceflight. Pool photo by Brandon BellWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How NASA Would Struggle Without SpaceX if Trump Cancels Musk’s Contracts

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      If President Trump cancels the contracts for Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company, the federal government would struggle to achieve many goals in orbit and beyond.In 2006, a small, little-known company named Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — SpaceX, for short — won a NASA contract to ferry cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.At that moment, SpaceX had not yet launched anything to orbit and would not succeed until two years later with its tiny Falcon 1 rocket. But since then, the Elon Musk-founded company has become the linchpin of all American civilian and military spaceflight.It started in 2010 with the launch of the first Falcon 9 rocket. By 2012 the launcher was sending cargo to the space station.NASA money helped finance the development of the Falcon 9, and SpaceX capitalized on the NASA seal of approval to entice companies to launch their satellites with SpaceX.It became the Southwest Airlines of the rocket industry, selling launches and hauling satellites into orbit at a lower price than most other rockets then available.That story repeated during the Obama administration when SpaceX won a contract to take astronauts to the space station, which it did for the first time in May 2020 during the first administration of President Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ispace of Japan’s Resilience Lander Heads to the Moon: How and When to Watch

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      Ispace crashed on the moon in 2023. Its second spacecraft, Resilience, aims in the hours ahead to succeed where its predecessor failed.Video posted by iSpace showed the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander circling the moon on Wednesday.iSpaceA Japanese company is hoping that the second time’s the charm for putting a robotic lander on the moon.Ispace of Tokyo is among the private companies that have emerged in recent years aiming to establish a profitable business by sending experiments and other payloads to the surface of the moon.Its first spacecraft made it to lunar orbit in 2023, but crashed as it attempted to land. Its second spacecraft, named Resilience, launched in January and has been taking a roundabout path to the moon, entering orbit last month.Resilience is now ready to descend to the lunar surface, and Ispace hopes that it will arrive there intact.When is the moon landing, and how can I watch it?Resilience, also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, is scheduled to land at 3:17 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. (It will be Friday at the company’s mission control in Tokyo.)Ispace will provide live coverage of the landing beginning at 2:10 p.m. Eastern time.What is Ispace, and what happened during its last moon mission?Ispace emerged from a Japanese team that had aimed to win the Google Lunar X Prize, which offered $20 million for the first privately financed venture to land on the moon. None of the X Prize teams got off the ground before the competition expired in 2018. Takeshi Hakamada, the leader of the Japanese X Prize team, raised private financing to push forward and is the chief executive of Ispace.Do You See Craters or Bumps on the Moon’s Surface?A picture taken recently by a Japanese company’s spacecraft shows how your interpretation of objective reality can be tested by the power of illusion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump to Withdraw Musk’s Ally as Nominee for Top NASA Job

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      Jared Isaacman was a close associate of Elon Musk, whose SpaceX company has multiple contracts with NASA.President Trump on Saturday said that he planned to withdraw his nomination of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and close associate of Elon Musk’s, to be the next NASA administrator, days before Mr. Isaacman’s expected confirmation to the role by the Senate.Mr. Trump in recent days told associates he intended to yank Mr. Isaacman’s nomination after being told that he had donated to prominent Democrats, according to three people with knowledge of the deliberations who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. Mr. Trump said on social media on Saturday that he had conducted a “thorough review of prior associations” before deciding to withdraw the nomination.Mr. Trump added that he would “soon announce a new Nominee who will be Mission aligned, and put America First in Space.”The U-turn was the latest example of how Mr. Trump uses loyalty as a key criterion for top administration roles, and came at a fraught moment for the space agency. NASA has so far been spared the deep cuts that have hit the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other federal research agencies. But the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026 seeks to slice the space agency’s budget by one-quarter, lay off thousands of employees and end financing for a slew of current and future missions.The Trump administration also wants to overhaul NASA’s human spaceflight program, ending the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule initiatives after the Artemis III mission that is to land astronauts on the moon in 2027 and adding money to send astronauts to Mars in the coming years, something that had been a priority for Mr. Musk.People inside and outside NASA had hoped that Mr. Isaacman’s arrival as administrator would help provide stability and a clearer direction for the agency, which has been operating under an acting administrator since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s term.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      China to Launch Tianwen-2 Mission to Capture Pieces of Near-Earth Asteroid

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      The robotic Tianwen-2 spacecraft will collect samples from Kamoʻoalewa, which some scientists suspect is a fragment of the moon.China has a space station and, in just a few short years, has landed robots on the moon and Mars. This week the country’s space agency is targeting new, far-flung destinations and setting off for an asteroid that could contain secrets that explain how Earth and the moon formed.The country’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft is set to lift off aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China some time on Thursday (it will be Wednesday in New York).After about a year, the robotic mission will arrive at 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, a near-Earth asteroid. There, it will perilously try to scoop up some rocky matter, and then swing back around to Earth. A capsule filled with geologic treasure would then plunge toward the planet for retrieval by scientists in late 2027.If Tianwen-2 pulls this off, China will become the third nation — after Japan and the United States — to retrieve pristine material from an asteroid.“All Chinese planetary scientists are now finger-crossed for this historic mission,” said Yuqi Qian, a lunar geologist at the University of Hong Kong.The spacecraft also has a secondary target, an unusual comet that it could study as part of an extended mission.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Voters Approve Incorporation of SpaceX Hub as Starbase, Texas

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      A South Texas community, mostly made up of SpaceX employees, voted 212 to 6 in favor of establishing a new city called Starbase.Members of a South Texas community that has served as the hub of Elon Musk’s rocket launch company, SpaceX, voted on Saturday to formally establish a new city called Starbase, fulfilling one of Mr. Musk’s long-held dreams.All but six of the 218 people who voted supported incorporating the city of Starbase, according to Cameron County, which administered the vote.There were 283 eligible voters, said Remi Garza, the elections administrator for the county.The community, known to locals as Boca Chica, covers about 1.5 square miles on a spit of land that brushes up against the Mexican border.SpaceX broke ground in the area in 2014, and it has since become the company’s central hub and launch site, as well as home to hundreds of its employees.On his social media platform, X, Mr. Musk has referred to the area as Starbase more than a dozen times in the past four years.“My primary home is literally a ~$50k house in Boca Chica / Starbase that I rent from SpaceX,” Mr. Musk wrote in June 2021. “It’s kinda awesome though.”In December, people living around the company offices and launch site filed a petition to officially establish the city of Starbase, Texas. More

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      Molecular, Glow-in-the-Dark Cloud Discovered Close to Earth

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      The cloud, named Eos, is chock-full of molecular hydrogen and possibly rife with star-forming potential in the future.A newly discovered potentially star-forming cloud that is one of the largest structures in the sky.Thomas Müller (HdA/MPIA) and Thavisha Dharmawardena (NYU)Stars and planets are born inside swirling clouds of cosmic gas and dust that are brimming with hydrogen and other molecular ingredients. On Monday, astronomers revealed the discovery of the closest known cloud to Earth, a colossal, crescent-shaped blob of star-forming potential.Named Eos, after the Greek goddess of the dawn, the cloud was found lurking some 300 light-years from our solar system and is as wide as 40 of Earth’s moon lined up across the sky. According to Blakesley Burkhart, an astrophysicist at Rutgers University, it is the first molecular cloud to be detected using the fluorescent nature of hydrogen.“If you were to see this cloud on the sky, it’s enormous,” said Dr. Burkhart, who announced the discovery with colleagues in the journal Nature Astronomy. And “it is literally glowing in the dark,” she added.Identifying and studying clouds like Eos, particularly based on their hydrogen content, could reshape astronomers’ understanding of how much material in our galaxy is available to produce planets and stars. It will also help them measure the creation and destruction rates of the fuel that can drive such formations.“We are, for the first time, seeing this previously hidden reservoir of hydrogen that can form stars,” said Thavisha Dharmawardena, an astronomer at New York University who is an author of the study. After Eos, she said, astronomers are “hoping to find many more” such hydrogen-heavy clouds.Molecular hydrogen, which consists of two hydrogen atoms bound together, is the most abundant material in the universe. Stellar nurseries are chock-full of it. But it is difficult to detect the molecule from the ground because it glows in far-ultraviolet wavelengths that are readily absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Fireball Near Mexico City Lit Up the Sky and the Internet

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      The glowing object was a bolide, fireballs that explode in a bright flash, according to experts. It streaked across Mexico’s predawn skies on Wednesday.The bright object that streaked across the sky is called a bolide.Webcams de Mexico, Associated PressFor a few brief moments on Wednesday, a bright fireball lit up the predawn skies near Mexico City. The display awed residents and online viewers alike as videos of the object quickly spread.The glowing object was a bolide, according to The Associated Press. Bolides are fireballs that explode in a bright flash, often with visible fragmentation, according to the American Meteor Society.Whereas a meteorite is a space rock that reaches the ground, a bolide is “just the luminous phenomenon” associated with the object’s atmospheric entry, said Jérôme Gattacceca, the editor of The Meteoritical Bulletin of the Meteoritical Society, an organization that records all known meteorites.Meteors that are brighter in our sky than Venus are called “fireballs,” Dr. Gattacceca said. While meteors and fireballs are common, bolides are less so — though “still not rare,” he said.This echoes what Guadalupe Cordero Tercero, a researcher at the UNAM Institute of Geophysics and head of the Mexican Meteor Network project, told UNAM Global Magazine.It’s “estimated that every two and a half days an object at least one meter in diameter enters the Earth’s atmosphere,” Dr. Cordero Tercero said, according to the magazine. However most of these objects fall into the ocean or uninhabited areas, so they often go unnoticed.Denton Ebel, a curator of meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, said that while he had seen only some footage of the fireball and heard stories, “it sounds really exciting.”Meteors are “not as uncommon as many people think,” Dr. Ebel said, but they are being reported more frequently because of fireball networks, which are cameras parked atop buildings that capture the objects as they enter the atmosphere.UNAM Global Magazine also reported that the fireball roared after streaking across the dark sky. A sonic boom is associated with its breaking apart, Dr. Gattacceca said.“This noise is usually a good indicator that the object fragmented at relatively low altitude and that meteorites actually reached the ground,” he added.The rumbling can sound almost like a freight train, Dr. Ebel said.Meteors are all created by space rocks hitting the atmosphere at high speed, Dr. Gattacceca said, and most of these space rocks originate from the asteroid belt.Their high velocity means that small rocks, even the ones as small as a walnut, will “generate a fireball because of its elevated speed,” Dr. Gattacceca said.The object’s dazzling display caught the attention of many of the more than 22 million people who live in Mexico City, who had nothing to fear.“Nobody has ever been killed by a falling meteorite in historical times,” Dr. Gattacceca said, adding, “So, not dangerous.” More