As DeFi does away with middlemen in finance, “DeOps” could reduce the need for intermediaries in large-scale supply systems.
Read more PayPal opening its network to cryptocurrencies could create a serious tax headache for users.
Read more Not just the future of civilization is up for grabs this November. In this age of mobile social computing, we’re figuring out how to vote, entertain, teach, learn, and commit to meaningful change. Thanks to the pandemic emergency, our plans for transforming our country and planet are subject to immediate recall.
Much of the current political dynamic is expressed through the lense of “how much change can we afford to make?” The swing states in the race for the electoral college are those most profoundly affected by the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy. The choice: how many jobs will we lose by shifting away from oil and gas to wind and solar. Workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and Michigan are fearful of losing their livelihood to a future of retraining and disruption.
Regardless of where we sit along the left/right spectrum, we share the increasing understanding that government doesn’t work. Running for office is a gauntlet of fundraising and promises you can’t keep; legislating is a lobbyist playground where special interests are neither special nor in our interests. The courts are overwhelmed by political power plays timed to inflame and suppress voting turnout. It’s no wonder that the common reaction to this week’s final presidential debate was relief that the campaign is almost over.
The most important fix to the body politic is the mute button. For a brief moment in the debate, we got to experience a few seconds of not talking. Time seemed to stand still, as if we were being handed down a digital tablet of things to not do: don’t interrupt, don’t disrespect, don’t mock, don’t waste our time. Above all, don’t forget the people we’ve lost to the virus. Remember the days when our biggest problems were what show to watch, what music to play, what jokes to tell. It’s amazing what you can hear when the agenda is turned back to ourselves.
In that moment, you can hear things that smooth the soul. In that moment, you can hear the words leaders will have to speak to get our vote next time. I feel much better about the next election no matter how this one turns out. The explosive numbers of early voting tell us a lot about how this will go. The genie is out of the bottle and people are beginning to connect the dots. If the vote is suppressed, it only makes us try harder.
Mobility is about a return to value, to roots, to resilience. Working from home is a big step toward living from everywhere. AR stands for accelerated reality, VR for valued reality. If we want to know what social is good for, switch on the mute button and listen to what you’ve lost. If you can mute the sound, you can unmute it and find your voice.
At first, the mute button was a defensive move. It counteracted the business model of the cable news networks, the repetitive time-filling of partisan perspective mixed with not listening to the grievances of the other side. The hardest thing I’ve had to do is be open to the truth emanating from the least likely location. We are taught to attack our opponent’s weaknesses; a better strategy might be to respect their strengths and adopt them as your own. Don’t worry, though. You probably won’t find too much there to reflect.
Once you experience the mute button envelope, you can hear it even if it’s not there. The rules of the revised debate were that the first two minutes of each candidate’s response used the mute button, then the old rules returned. Even then, the experience of using the mute button informed the rest of the debate. Particularly noticeable was Joe Biden’s response to a series of back and forths when the moderator asked if he had any further response. “… … … No.”
There have been other mute buttons in history. The 18 and a half minute gap spoke loudly when Rose Mary Woods erased a crucial Watergate tape. Before that, we assumed there might be a smoking gun. After that, we knew there might be others, too. Throughout the campaign, we could learn more about what was really going on by listening for the moments when key questions were left unanswered, ducked, or bounced back to the opponent like some Pee Wee Herman playground retort.
Soon we’ll know the answer to the important question: how do we confront the virus? I vote for listening to the science, wearing a mask, socially distancing both off and online, rapid testing, and contact tracing. And the candidates who agree.
__________________
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, October 23, 2020.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.
The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.
As promised, Microsoft announced that it has added full trackpad and mouse support for the iPadOS version of Microsoft 360. That includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, marking another important step in Apple’s longstanding push to blur the line between tablet and desktop, making iPads more well-rounded productivity machines.
Apple laid the foundation back in March, with the release of iPadOS 13.4. Announced alongside the latest iPad Pro, the technology introduced the ability to pair a trackpad or mouse with the tablet, bringing an on-screen cursor. Romain breaks it down more fully here. Along with the new tablet and operating system upgrade came a new (pricey) keyboard sporting a built-in trackpad.
Image Credits: Microsoft
Today’s upgrade from Microsoft builds on that, offering a more desktop-like experience when using its productivity tools on the latest iPad, iPad Pro and iPad Air. It can be used for standard Office things, like highlighting text, selecting range cells in Excel and resizing graphics. Stuff that was possible before, but will definitely benefit from an approach more familiar to anyone who’s used to doing these things on a laptop/desktop.
The update brings a handful of other additions, including a clearer interface and newly organized menus. All should be rolling out to users “within a couple of weeks,” per Microsoft.
Facebook gets into cloud gaming while continuing its public dispute with Apple, Ant Group prepares for a massive IPO and Pinterest embraces iOS widgets. This is your Daily Crunch for October 26, 2020.
The big story: Facebook launches cloud gaming service
Facebook is launching a cloud gaming service of its very own, although the focus is different from Google’s Stadia or Microsoft’s xCloud. Rather than trying to recreate the console experience on other devices, the social network’s gaming service is limited to mobile games, particularly on reducing the friction between seeing an ad for a game and playing the game.
The service is launching on the web and on Android, but it’s not available on iOS. Facebook blamed Apple’s App Store terms and conditions for the absence.
Facebook’s Jason Rubin told TechCrunch that Apple’s rules for cloud gaming service present “a sequence of hurdles that altogether make a bad consumer experience.”
The tech giants
Twitter will show all U.S. users warnings about voting misinfo and delayed election results — Starting today, Twitter users in the U.S. will see two large notices at the top of their feeds that aim to “preemptively debunk” misinformation related to voting.
Ant Group could raise as much as $34.5B in IPO in what would be world’s largest IPO — The long-anticipated IPO of Alibaba-affiliated Chinese fintech giant Ant Group could raise tens of billions of dollars in a dual-listing on both the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges.
Pinterest’s new widget brings photos from favorite boards to your iOS 14 home screen — As iPhone owners began customizing their iOS 14 home screens with new widgets and custom icons, Pinterest iOS downloads and searches surged.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Tencent leads $100M Series B funding round into China-based esport provider VSPN — Founded in 2016, VSPN was one of the early pioneers in esports tournament organization and content creation out of Asia.
Linktree raises $10.7M for its lightweight, link-centric user profiles — The Melbourne startup says that 8 million users, including celebrities like Selena Gomez and brands like Red Bull, have created profiles on the platform.
This startup wants to fix the broken structure of internships — Symba created white-label software to help companies communicate and collaborate with their now-distributed interns.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Good and bad board members (and what to do about them) — The CircleUp saga brings up questions about what happens behind the scenes at startups and about board composition specifically.
What would Databricks be worth in a 2021 IPO? — We’ve described Databricks as “an obvious IPO candidate,” and now it sounds like an offering is indeed in the works.
(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
NASA discovers water on the surface of the sunlit portion of the moon — Previously, we knew that water was present as ice on the dark part of the moon, but this is still a groundbreaking discovery.
Human Capital: Court ruling could mean trouble for Uber and Lyft as gig workers may finally become employees — Megan Rose Dickey has officially launched her newsletter focused on labor, diversity and inclusion in tech.
Original Content podcast: ‘Lovecraft Country’ is gloriously bonkers — Bonkers!
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Immigration law firm Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy has confirmed a data breach involving the personal information of current and former Google employees.
The New York-based law firm provides companies with employment verification screening services to determine if employees are eligible and authorized to work in the United States.
Every company operating in the United States is required to maintain a Form I-9 file on every employee to ensure that they are legally allowed to work and not subject to more restrictive immigration rules. But Form I-9 files can contain a ton of sensitive information, including government documents like passports, ID cards and driver’s licenses, and other personally identifiable data, making them a target for hackers and identity thieves.
But the law firm said it discovered last month that an unauthorized third-party accessed a file containing personal information on a “limited number” of current and former Google employees.
In a notice with the California attorney general’s office, Fragomen did not say what kind of data was accessed or how many Google employees were affected. Companies with more than 500 California residents affected by a breach are required to submit a notice with the state’s attorney general’s office.
Michael McNamara, a spokesperson for Fragomen, declined to say how many Google employees were affected by the breach.
A spokesperson for Google did not respond to a request for comment.
There likely isn’t a robotics teacher institute in the world actively pursuing robotic learning. The field, after all, holds the key to unlocking a lot of potential for the industry. One of the things that makes it so remarkable is the myriad different approaches so many researchers are taking to unlock the secrets of helping robots essentially learn from scratch.
A new paper from Johns Hopkins University sporting the admittedly delightful name “Good Robot” explores the potential of learning through positive reinforcement. The title derives from an anecdote from author Andrew Hundt about teaching his dog to not chase after squirrels. I won’t go into that here — you can just watch this video instead:
But the core of the idea is to offer the robot some manner of incentive when it gets something correct, rather than a disincentive when it does something wrong. For robots, incentives come in the form of a scoring system — essentially a kind of gamification that rewards a number of points based on correctly executing a task.
The PhD candidate says the method was able to reduce the training time of a task significantly. “The robot wants the higher score,” Hundt said in a release tied to the research. “It quickly learns the right behavior to get the best reward. In fact, it used to take a month of practice for the robot to achieve 100% accuracy. We were able to do it in two days.”
The tasks are still quite elementary, including stacking bricks and navigating through a video game, but there’s hope that future robots will be able to work up to more complex and useful real-world tasks.
Just over one week before Election Day, over 60 million Americans have already cast early votes. That dwarfs 2016’s entire early voting total of 47.2 million, and the number is going to keep growing significantly this week.
“This is good news!” wrote Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who heads up the US Election Project, which tracks early voting nationally. “There were many concerns about election officials’ ability to conduct an election during a pandemic. Not only are people voting, but they are voting over a longer period of time, thereby spreading out the workload of election officials.”
At a time when there is so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt about American elections (and lots of it unwarranted), it’s important to spotlight that “frankly, it’s going well,” as Benjamin Hovland, chairman of the Electoral Assistance Commission, told me last week.
“We see an opportunity for political actors both domestic and foreign to opportunistically select projections, data, or cases they can use to amplify confusion, to sow doubt.”
Kate Starbird, Election Integrity Partnership
But what about the day itself? What should you be prepared for over the hours, days and weeks after November 3?
“We’re expecting a mess,” says Kate Starbird, a crisis informatics researcher at the University of Washington and one of the lead researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership.
“My plan for Election Day is to start the day very early with a lot of coffee,” says Eddie Perez, an election expert at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, “and to be prepared to not go to sleep for 24 hours or much more.”
What will happen
November 3 may begin with long lines, and it will probably end with unusual amounts of uncertainty.
On Monday, Starbird published a report zeroing in on the exact sort of “uncertainty and misinformation” experts expect on Election Day, that evening, and going forward.
They are ready for social media to be filled with photos and videos of long lines, confusing ballots, or malfunctioning voting machines—the sorts of problems that occur every time America votes. But this time around, these pieces of information will likely be used to push specific slanted narratives at a moment when voter are waiting for conclusive election results to arrive, an information vacuum that leaves the country particularly vulnerable.
What we’ll know
Perhaps the most consequential moment of the day will happen between 7 and 9 p.m. Eastern Time, shortly after many East Coast polls close and some states start to report information on millions of mail-in and early votes, not to mention the standard Election Day ballots. That will begin to tell the story of the election.
To start with, the exact mechanics of counting varies by state. As polls close, the memory cards and USB sticks coming from both the computers that count mail-in votes and the equipment that handled early in-person voting will need just minutes to tabulate weeks’ worth of early votes. Many election officials will be double-checking results reports before publicly releasing numbers, to make sure that the numbers add up and to avoid confusion. Otherwise they could contribute to chaos at a particularly high-stakes moment.
“Even though it’s going to take some time to count every single ballot in every state, particularly given the legal battles that have been taking place over final deadlines, there will be many weeks and millions of ballots’ worth of results that will be able to be released as part of early voting pretty early on election night,” Perez says. “It is not going to be a total information vacuum. And I think that those early results are going to provide some early indicators of what the trends are, and that then is going to send the campaigns into different spin operations.”
So we will know something about the results on Election Day. Exactly how much we’ll know remains up in the air—dependent on both the actual votes and the processes states use to count those votes. But it’s important to note that although mail-in votes take longer to count and often are counted later than in-person votes, most states allow processing of mail-in votes to start before Election Day.
What we won’t know
The level of early voting is also a virtual guarantee that we will see disinformation proliferate through traditional and social media throughout the day.
“We see an opportunity for political actors both domestic and foreign to opportunistically select projections, data, or cases they can use to amplify confusion, to sow doubt,” Starbird says. “Especially to set the stage so that if early results do go one way that then change as mail-in ballots come in, we see domestic groups setting the stage for tying those to voter fraud claims. They’ve already laid the foundation for this false narrative of voter fraud.”
Starbird’s analysis details some of the key threats based on the study of recent crisis moments in which social media played a big role: Stories and videos about the voting process will be distorted to fit preconceived narratives, premature winners will be declared, so-called “evidence” of voter fraud will be amplified, and social-media companies taking action to stop the spread of misinformation will be accused of censorship. Potential phenomena like a red or blue “shift” in which results change as in-person, early, and mail-in votes are counted will be used to build on preexisting false narratives undermining confidence in the election results.
Mainly, you should expect uncertainty
When you see examples of issues with ballots or polling stations, try to understand them in a broader context: dramatic and often unverified anecdotes get amplified but are not the norm. And think twice about what anyone except for state and local election officials says about results, because candidates have their own needs to serve. “Armchair data scientists” are not going to add to your understanding of the results, even if their analyses are tempting.
“Many people in past elections feel they are used to ‘knowing’ the winner on election night,” Perez says. “In fact, that has never really been the case. It’s always taken weeks for official results to be certified. The reality is that nobody has ever officially known the winner on election night.”
Unofficial results combined with media projections have existed, of course, and in general the consensus aligns with the official results that come in later down the line. But this election in the time of a pandemic is fundamentally different from any that’s come before, and we have to understand that the results may come in differently, and later, as a result.
“There will be claims of voter fraud and claims that the election is rigged; it’s an inevitability,” Starbird says. “How salient that is, how much people grab on, depends on results and margins of victory. But some of the worst scenarios are that a large portion of society feels they’ve been cheated. That’s where you start to lose trust in democracy.”
This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.
If you don’t already know: Yes, there is water on the moon. NASA suggests there’s as much as 600 million metric tons of water ice there, which could someday help lunar colonists survive. It could even be turned into an affordable form of rocket fuel (you just have to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, and presto—you have propulsion for spaceflight).
Unfortunately, we’ve never known how much water is actually on the moon, where exactly those reserves are stored, or how to access and harvest it. Nor have scientists ever really understood how water originated there.
We still don’t have answers to these questions, but two new studies published in Nature Astronomy today do suggest that water on the moon is not as hidden away as scientists once thought.
Through the looking glass
The first study reports the detection of water molecules on lunar surfaces exposed to sunlight near the 231 kilometer-long Clavius crater, thanks to observations made by the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) run by NASA and the German Aerospace Center. It has long been thought that water would have the best chance of remaining stable in regions of the moon, such as large craters, that are permanently covered in shadows. Such regions and any water they contained, researchers thought, would be protected from temperature disturbances induced by the sun’s rays.
As it turns out, there’s water sitting in broad daylight. “This is the first time we can say with certainty that the water molecule is present on the lunar surface,” says Casey Honniball, a researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of the SOFIA study.
The SOFIA observations point to water molecules incorporated into the structure of glass beads, which allows the molecules to withstand sunlight exposure. The amount of water contained in these glassy beads is comparable to 12 ounces dispersed over a cubic meter of soil, spread across the surface of the moon. “We expect the abundance of water to increase as we move closer to the poles,” says Honniball. “But what we observed with SOFIA is the opposite”—the beads were found in a latitudinal region that’s closer to the equator, though that’s not likely to be a global phenomenon.
SOFIA is an airborne observatory built out of a modified 747 that flies high through the atmosphere, so its nine-foot telescope can observe objects in space with minimal disturbance by Earth’s water-heavy atmosphere. This is especially useful for observing in infrared wavelengths, and in this case it helped researchers distinguish molecular water from hydroxyl compounds on the moon.
The glassy water features on the moon were previously found in an investigation on lunar mineralogy conducted in 1969 (thanks to observations made by a balloon observatory). But those observations were not reported and published. “Maybe they did not realize the big discovery they had actually made,” says Honniball.
The amount of water contained in the glassy beads is a bit low to be useful to humans, but it’s possible the concentration is much greater in other areas (the SOFIA study only focused on one area of the moon).
More important, the findings tease the possibility of a “lunar water cycle” that might replenish water reserves on the moon, something that seems barely comprehensible for a world long thought to be dry and dead. “It’s a new area we’ve not really looked at in any great detail before,” says Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame, who was not involved in either study.
The smallest shadows
The second study, however, might be more relevant to NASA’s immediate plans for lunar exploration. The new findings suggest that the moon’s water ice reserves are sustained in what are called “micro cold traps” that are just a centimeter or less in diameter. New 3D models generated using thermal infrared and optical images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the temperatures in these micro traps are low enough to keep water ice intact. They may be responsible for housing 10 to 20% of the water stored in all the moon’s permanent shadows, for a total area of about 40,000 square kilometers, mostly in regions closer to the poles.
“Instead of just a handful of large cold traps within ‘craters with names,’ there’s a whole galaxy of tiny cold traps spread out over the whole polar region,” says Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the lead author of the study. “Micro cold traps are much more accessible than larger, permanently shadowed regions. Rather than designing missions to venture deep into the shadows, astronauts and rovers could remain in sunlight while extracting water from micro cold traps.” There might be hundreds of millions or even billions of these sites strewn across the lunar surface.
More data makes more mysteries
The studies aren’t perfect. There is no clear explanation yet for how these water-bearing glasses formed. Honniball says they likely originated from meteorites that either generated the water upon impact or delivered it as is. Or they could be the result of ancient volcanic activity. Neal points out the SOFIA study isn’t able to provide a complete picture of why the distribution of glass appears as a function of latitude, or how it might change over a full lunar cycle. Direct observations are needed to confirm what both studies suggest, and to answer the questions they raise.
We might not have to wait long for that kind of data. In the run-up to the Artemis missions intended to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon, NASA plans to launch a suite of robotic missions that would also help characterize the water ice content on the moon. The most high-profile of these missions is VIPER, a rover scheduled for launch in 2022 that’s supposed to prospect for subsurface water ice.
In light of the new findings, NASA might elect to change VIPER’s goal a bit to study surface water as well, and take a closer look at any glass features under the sun or examine how well the micro cold traps might work to preserve water ice. Other NASA payloads, as well as missions run by other countries, are likely to study the contents of surface water more closely. Neal suggests that a lunar exosphere monitoring system would be very useful in unraveling the history of water on the moon and figuring out how a possible lunar water cycle results in stable (or unstable) water on the surface.
“The more we look at the moon, the less we seem to understand,” says Neal. “Now we’ve got a few more reasons to go back and study it. We’ve got to get to the surface and get samples and set up monitoring stations to actually get definitive data to study this kind of cycle.”
The US space program has been a footnote to every presidential administration since Richard Nixon. Nothing, not even the space shuttle or the International Space Station, could define a presidency or an era of American life the way the Apollo program did.
It still won’t define the first (and maybe only) presidential term of Donald Trump. But even before Trump moved into the White House, his campaign and some of his policy advisors in the space community dropped hints that the administration would take a big interest in the direction of the space program.
Sure enough, there were some major changes. Many of these new policies had their origins before Trump. But the administration accelerated things to a speed the program has not moved at in decades.
Whether Trump is reelected or not, he has had an outsize impact on the space program. That influence will be felt over the next four years no matter who occupies the White House. Here are the five biggest impacts Trump has had on US space policy.
1. From Mars to the moon
On December 11, 2017, Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, which officially called for NASA to begin work on a human exploration program that would return astronauts to the surface of the moon and lay the groundwork for a sustained presence (i.e., a lunar colony). This was a pivot from President Obama’s directions for NASA to build a program that would take humans to Mars in the 2030s and establish a sustained presence there. The plan was for the moon missions to utilize the architectures being developed for Mars, such as the next-generation Space Launch System and the Orion deep space crew capsule.
Early last year, the administration accelerated the timeline for the return to 2024. “The common thread among many of the policy options, transition and industry officials said, is a focus on projects able to attract widespread voter support that realistically can be completed during Mr. Trump’s current four-year presidential term,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 2017. Though a 2024 landing would happen in a second term, should Trump win reelection it would be a defining achievement of his presidency. Most experts agree, however, that NASA is increasingly unlikely to meet that deadline.
But there are also arguments for why the moon makes sense. As current NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine likes to say, the moon is a “proving ground” for deep space missions to places like Mars. It’s easier to get to, offers a low-gravity environment to test out life support systems and other technologies needed for long-term off-world living, and could be a site of fuel production for future spacecraft.
During Obama’s presidency, many people in the space community felt that going directly to Mars “was such a big problem, and the money was so inadequate for that, that it became almost worse than nothing,” says Casey Dreier, a space policy expert with the Planetary Society. “They said they were going to Mars but contributed almost nothing to that effort.”
As Obama’s term drew to a close, “it became very clear that the moon was going to have to be the objective,” says James Vedda, a policy analyst with the Aerospace Corporation. “Trump just made it official.”
This won’t change, even if there’s a new administration in the White House come January. The Democratic platform released this year says the party is on board with going to the moon, though the unreasonable 2024 deadline will likely get pushed back.
2. Commercialization of low Earth orbit
This was another trend continued from past administrations. The Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program (which contracted private companies to run resupply missions to the ISS) had its beginnings under George W. Bush and matured under Obama. The success of this program helped bolster support for the Commercial Crew Program (CCP) under Obama (when Joe Biden was vice president), which aimed to replace the space shuttle with commercial vehicles developed by SpaceX and Boeing to send astronauts to the space station. After numerous delays (some of which put NASA in the unenviable position of having to extend its reliance on Russia for access to the ISS), CCP finally realized its goals in May, when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle took astronauts to the ISS.
Trump can’t take credit for CRS or CCP, but he can take credit for applying its blueprint to the space program as a whole (even if CCP’s success is still to be determined). Trump embraced commercialization of low Earth orbit. “Seeing [CRS and CCP] pay off now with a sort of Midas touch about it, we’ve seen NASA now take that and put it almost everywhere it possibly can,” says Dreier. NASA wants to buy moon rocks from private companies, buy Earth science imagery from commercial satellites, open the ISS up to private visitors, and bring private companies to the moon.
In Dreier’s view, the big question is whether the success of sending people to the space station through commercial partners can be replicated elsewhere, for things that haven’t been tried before. A commercial company has never landed on the moon—yet in less than four years a commercially built lander is expected to do exactly that, with human astronauts. The Trump administration has set things into turbo-drive, resulting in a flurry of new activities and opportunities for the commercial sector. But given how volatile spaceflight is, a new administration might prefer to slow down that approach to strengthen safety testing.
3. Space Force
The rise of China and the deterioration of relations with Russia, the only other two space powers that could rival the US, have been a concern for US officials on both sides of the political aisle. The potential for conflicts in orbit has grown over time.
The Trump administration’s big idea? Space Force. It sounds like something from a 1950s comic book, but it was essentially a catchy way of making sure enough attention and resources would be devoted to scanning Earth’s orbit for threats and fortifying national assets against interference. As space activity grew, that organization would grow as well—and the Air Force could concentrate on things on the ground.
Not everyone thinks it is such a good idea. A major argument against Space Force is that it doesn’t do anything the Air Force didn’t already handle. It reorganizes those operations under one roof, but it also adds new layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy. As the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon has argued, the creation of a small US Space Command to oversee space operations across the military made sense; a bloated Space Force does not.
Both Democrats and Republicans had pondered creating such an organization for quite some time, says Vedda. He thinks Trump’s real impact was to accelerate the timeline by a decade and make the venture permanent. There isn’t really a path to disband the Space Force, even if a new administration wanted to (and the Biden campaign has made no suggestion it would try). More frequent antisatellite testing by Russia has made it clear that conflicts in space can and are likely to spring up in the future. Space Force might sound silly—but it’s probably here to stay.
4. Earth science
It’s hardly been a secret Trump has spent his entire term trying to gut NASA’s work in studying climate change. The administration tried to ax NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 mission. It still wants to cancel the ocean-observing PACE mission and the climate-studying CLARREO mission. NOAA has suffered decreases in funding for its environmental satellite programs.
Trump hasn’t eliminated the Earth science observation that’s done from space, but he’s blunted its impact by limiting how the data can be used. At a time when climate change is getting worse and we should be augmenting these programs, the administration has chosen instead to leave the Paris accords and deregulate greenhouse-gas emissions.
5. National Space Council
Lastly, an achievement for Trump that has rather slipped under the radar: the resurrection of the National Space Council, a body (defunct since 1993) that brings together officials from many different parts of the government (such as national security, energy, commerce, and transportation) to discuss the US space program. Space encompasses a lot of different areas, but Vedda argues that people tend to specialize in only one, which makes it harder for them to think about considerations outside their own field. “Issues can very easily fall through the cracks,” he says. “The National Space Council makes sure none of these things fall through the cracks.”
The Trump administration’s decision to resurrect the council was unusual, helped by the fact that Vice President Mike Pence (who chairs the council) took a big interest in space. It has been a surprising force in shaping the direction of US space policy, bringing together discussions on everything from how the military and NASA could collaborate to satellite regulation and communications standards to future technology and energy experiments. It’s unclear whether Biden would keep the council going. Space officials from around the country recently came together to “war game” a hypothetical council operating under Biden, but if his running mate, Kamala Harris, shows no interest, it could very well be on its way out once again.