Mayor, County Executive declare it ‘Jeanette Epps' Day in Syracuse, Onondaga County
Epps, still on a back-to-earth tour after spending eight months in space last year, spoke to Le Moyne students and community members Monday evening before sharing stories from space in the auditorium of Corcoran High School on Tuesday, April 8.
The event began with Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh and Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon reading a proclamation detailing Epps' hometown roots and achievements.
Epps is a graduate of Corcoran High School and Le Moyne College.
In lower-profile fashion, Epps came back to Syracuse in February for a Le Moyne College Board of Trustees meeting and sat down for an interview on Newsmakers.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scientific American
23 minutes ago
- Scientific American
Trump Cuts Could End U.S. Exploration of the Outer Solar System
In the spring of 2022 the U.S. space community selected its top priority for the nation's next decade of science and exploration: a mission to Uranus, the gassy, bluish planet only seen up close during a brief spacecraft flyby in 1986. More than 2.6 billion kilometers from Earth at its nearest approach, Uranus still beckons with what it could reveal about the solar system's early history—and the overwhelming numbers of Uranus-sized worlds that astronomers have spied around other stars. Now President Donald Trump's proposed cuts to NASA could push those discoveries further away than ever—not by directly canceling the mission but by abandoning the fuel needed to pull it off. The technology in question, known as radioisotope power systems (RPS), is an often overlooked element of NASA's budget that involves turning nuclear fuel into usable electricity. More like a battery than a full-scale reactor, RPS devices attach directly to spacecraft to power them into the deepest, darkest reaches of the solar system, where sunlight is too sparse to use. It's a critical technology that has enabled two dozen NASA missions, from the iconic Voyagers 1 and 2 now traversing interstellar space to the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers presently operating on Mars. But RPS is expensive, costing NASA about $175 million in 2024 alone. That's largely because of the costs of sourcing and refining plutonium 238, the chemically toxic, vanishingly scarce and difficult to work with radioactive material at the heart of all U.S. RPS. The Fiscal Year 2026 President's Budget Request (PBR) released this spring suggests shutting down the program by 2029. That's just long enough to use RPS tech on NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission, a nuclear-powered dual-quadcopter drone to explore Saturn's frigid moon Titan. After that, without RPS, no further U.S. missions to the outer solar system would be possible for the foreseeable future. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. 'It was an oversight,' says Amanda Hendrix, director of the Planetary Science Institute, who has led science efforts on RPS-enabled NASA missions such as Cassini at Saturn and Galileo at Jupiter. 'It's really like the left hand wasn't talking to the right hand when the PBR was put together.' Throughout its 400-odd pages, the PBR repeatedly acknowledges the importance of planning for the nation's next generation of planetary science missions and even proposes funding NASA's planetary science division better than any other part of the space agency's science operations, which it seeks to cut by half. But 'to achieve cost savings,' it states, 2028 should be the last year of funding for RPS, and 'given budget constraints and the reduced pipeline of new planetary science missions,' the proposed budget provides no funding after 2026 for work by the Department of Energy (DOE) that supports RPS. Indeed, NASA's missions to the outer solar system are infrequent because of their long durations and the laborious engineering required for a spacecraft to withstand cold, inhospitable conditions so far from home. But what these missions lack in frequency, they make up for in discovery: some of the most tantalizing and potentially habitable environments beyond Earth are thought to exist there, in vast oceans of icy moons once thought to be wastelands. One such environment lurks on Saturn's Enceladus, which was ranked as the nation's second-highest priority after Uranus in the U.S.'s 2022 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey. 'The outer solar system is kind of the last frontier,' says Alex Hayes, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, who chaired the Decadal Survey panel that selected Enceladus. 'You think you know how something works until you send a spacecraft there to explore it, and then you realize that you had no idea how it worked.' Unlike solar power systems—relatively 'off-the-shelf' tech that can be used on a per-mission basis—RPS requires a continuous production pipeline that's vulnerable to disruption. NASA's program operates through the DOE, with the space agency purchasing DOE services to source, purify and encapsulate the plutonium 238 fuel, as well as to assemble and test the resulting RPS devices. The most common kind of RPS, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, converts the thermal energy released from plutonium 238's natural decay to as much as 110 watts of electrical power. Any excess heat helps keep the spacecraft and its instruments warm enough to function. Establishing the RPS pipeline took around three decades, and the program's roots lie in the bygone cold war era of heavy U.S. investment in nuclear technology and infrastructure. Preparing the radioactive fuel alone takes the work of multiple DOE facilities scattered across the country: Oak Ridge National Laboratory produces the plutonium oxide, then Los Alamos National Laboratory forms it into usable pellets, which are finally stockpiled at Idaho National Laboratory. Funding cuts would throw this pipeline into disarray and cause an exodus of experienced workers, Hendrix says. Restoring that expertise and capability, she adds, would require billions of dollars and a few decades more. 'These decisions are made by people that don't fully understand the implications,' says Ryan P. Russell, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at Austin. 'Technologically, [RPS] is on the critical path to superiority in space, whether that's military, civilian or industrial applications.' Russell emphasizes that RPS isn't just critical for exploring Uranus, Enceladus and other destinations in the outer solar system—it's also a likely fundamental pillar of the administration's space priorities, such as developing a sustained human presence on the moon and sending astronauts to Mars. While both destinations are relatively close to the sun, the Red Planet's global dust storms can bury solar panels, and the moon's two-week-long lunar nights are cold enough to test the mettle of even the best batteries. The latter situation informed the reasoning that drove NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy's directive last week to fast-track a lunar nuclear reactor. Abandoning smaller-scale nuclear options such as RPS while aiming for a full-scale reactor is 'like trying to build a house without a two-by-four,' Russell says. 'If you don't have the basic building blocks, you're not gonna get very far.' Another initiative reliant on RPS, NASA confirmed in a statement e-mailed to Scientific American, is the beleaguered Mars Sample Return (MSR) program that the U.S. agency has been jointly pursuing with the European Space Agency. While the White House has proposed nixing MSR, scientists and politicians view bringing Martian samples back to Earth as a key milestone in the modern-day space race against China. Meanwhile other nations are pursuing or preserving their own RPS capabilities, with Europe's sights set on americium 241, a radioisotope with a five-times-longer half-life but a five-times-weaker energy output than plutonium 238. Russia has used RPS for decades, and China and India are also developing homegrown versions of the technology. Notably, despite the administration's push for commercial partners to take up costly space functions such as rocket launches, RPS is unlikely to find much support in the private sector. 'Dealing with [this sort of] nuclear material—that's not something a company is going to do,' Russell says. Going forward, the planetary science community hopes to convince Congress that RPS is 'critical and foundational,' Hendrix says. The Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG), which was chartered by and provides independent input to NASA, expressed its concerns to the space agency in findings from a June meeting, writing that the decision would have 'dire implications' for future solar system exploration. White papers prepared by representatives of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center and Glenn Research Center conveyed similar sentiments, noting that nine of the 15 existing and future missions recommended in the latest Decadal Survey use RPS. In short, 'you're just hamstringing your ability to do certain mission configurations and also to get out to and past Saturn if you shut down RPS,' Hayes says. 'You can't argue that scientific prioritization was part of [the White House's] decision process.' Although both the House and Senate have released drafts of the 2026 appropriations bill that preserve top-line funding for NASA, neither explicitly mentions RPS. That means the program would fall under NASA's 'discretionary spending,' a category that scientists and legal experts alike say would be more easily manipulated by a presidential administration looking to enforce its political agenda. In other words, without a clear, direct callout for RPS from congressional appropriators, the Trump administration's plan to shut down the program could more easily come to pass. Hendrix consequently hopes that Congress will add language explicitly funding RPS in its final budget. 'There is a strong interest from Congress in the need for a powerful, deep-space energy source,' says a congressional staffer who is familiar with the NASA budget and was granted anonymity to discuss these issues freely. But 'I don't know that members have quite honed in on [RPS] yet because the worry is so much about [Trump's] intent to cancel a lot of future planetary missions.' Fundamentally, political support for outer solar system missions is a moot point without corresponding support for the ability to get there, explains University of Oregon planetary physicist and OPAG co-chair Carol Paty. The decision to shut down RPS 'seems like a simple line item,' she says. But the implications are 'deeply troubling and concerning. If there are not big missions to drive the community, to drive exploration, to drive training the next generation, where does that leave us?'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
How Trump's commercial spaceflight executive order could benefit SpaceX, Elon Musk
SpaceX and Elon Musk just notched a significant win with President Donald Trump's latest executive order. Trump on Wednesday, Aug. 13, signed an executive order that eases many federal regulatory restrictions on commercial spaceflight companies in the U.S. Though SpaceX is not mentioned by name in the order, the commercial spaceflight company perhaps stands to gain the most from the move due to its many lucrative government contracts and active launch cadence in the U.S. The order also comes more than two months since Trump and Musk had a very public feud over a spending bill that led to a falling-out between the once-close allies – and threats that could have hampered U.S. spaceflight ambitions. Here's everything to know about Trump's commercial spaceflight executive order, as well as SpaceX's long battle with government regulators. Trump signs executive order on commercial rocket launches Trump's order directs the U.S. transportation secretary to eliminate or expedite environmental reviews for launch appovals administered by the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches. The declaration further calls on the secretary to do away with "outdated, redundant or overly restrictive rules for launch and re-entry vehicles," the White House said in a statement provided to Reuters. Trump's order states that it is imperative to increase commercial rocket launches in the U.S. to "ensure that new space-based industries, space exploration capabilities, and cutting-edge defense systems are pioneered in America rather than by our adversaries." Interestingly, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, whose title is referenced several times in the order, was appointed in July as interim administrator of NASA. Following the news, Duffy praised Trump in a post on social media site X calling the order "visionary." "We're launching into the final frontier and this EO makes it possible for the U.S. to lead the world from earth travel to space travel," Duffy said in the post. Order could ease environmental regulations for SpaceX missions The executive order would directly benefit private spaceflight companies like Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, both of which conduct the bulk of their operations in Texas. But SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002, likely stands to gain the most from the relaxed regulatory environment. The commercial rocket launch company leads the way in U.S. spaceflight missions by routinely conducting Starlink satellite deployments using its Falcon 9 rocket from both California and Florida. SpaceX's Falcon 9, one of the world's most active rockets, is also the vehicle of choice for NASA when the space agency sends astronauts to the International Space Station. What's more, the SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule perched atop the rocket is the only U.S. vehicle capable of transporting astronauts to the orbital laboratory. SpaceX additionally benefits from billions of dollars in contracts from not only NASA, but the Department of Defense by providing launch services for classified satellites and other payloads. Trump's order comes as SpaceX prepares to launch its massive 400-foot Starship rocket again in August from its Starbase headquarters in South Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. Musk has also oft-stated his commitment to increasing the cadence of test missions for the spacecraft after receiving key regulatory approval. The launch vehicle, regarded as the world's largest and most powerful rocket, is set to serve a pivotal role in future U.S. spaceflight. Starship is the centerpiece of Musk's vision of sending the first humans to Mars, and is also critical in NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon's surface. Elon Musk, SpaceX have battled regulations for years Trump's executive order is undoubtedly a huge win for Musk, who has spent years pushing back on federal regulations he views as "superfluous." In September 2024, the FAA announced a proposal to hit SpaceX with $633,009 in civil penalties for what the agency claims were failures by the company to follow license requirements ahead of two separate launches in 2023. In response, Musk took to his social media site X to indicate his plans to sue the agency for "regulatory overreach." The FAA has previously said in a statement to USA TODAY that it seeks to balance spaceflight progress with the need to ensure commercial launches are safely conducted. A record 148 FAA-licensed commercial space operations took place in 2024, up by more than 30% from the year prior, the agency has noted. But when it comes to Starship's development, SpaceX has become known for its risk-tolerant philosophy. Musk has stressed that rapid and frequent testing that sometimes leads to explosive ends can still provide data that helps engineers improve the vehicle's design. Environmental groups, others long oppose SpaceX rocket launches That aggressive approach, though, has rankled environmentalists and others who have criticized SpaceX's operations for potentially decimating regional ecosystems. The South Texas Environmental Justice Network, which has long opposed Musk and his space program, most recently issued a statement in May condemning the FAA for approving SpaceX's request to increase its Starship flight tests to 25 a year. In late June, Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum threatened to sue SpaceX if investigators determined that Musk's spaceflight company had contributed to undue pollution and marine life die-off in the country. The announcement came after the fiery mishap earlier in the month caused debris to fall in the Mexican state of Tamaulipa. Contributing: Reuters Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: SpaceX to benefit from Trump order on commercial rocket launches Solve the daily Crossword
Newsweek
2 hours ago
- Newsweek
House-Sized Asteroid Approaching Earth, NASA Reports
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. NASA is tracking a house-sized asteroid set to zip past the Earth on August 16 at around 17,717 miles per hour. Known as 2025 PR1, the space rock is estimated to be about 55 feet across and will make its closest approach on Saturday, at a distance of 609,000 miles, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Three more space rocks are expected to zoom past the Earth next week. On August 17, a plane-sized asteroid known as 2025 PM, will make its closest approach at a distance of 654,000 miles. On August 20, two asteroids will follow. A stadium-sized asteroid, 990 feet across, known as 1997 QK1 will pass within 1,870,000 miles, followed by 2025 OV4, 160 feet across, which will come as close as 1,800,000 miles away. A stock image shows an asteroid zipping past the Earth, as seen from space. A stock image shows an asteroid zipping past the Earth, as seen from space. getty images Small asteroids up to 30 feet across impact the Earth about once in a decade. They typically cause a bright fireball and a strong sonic boom—and may break the odd window—but they do not usually cause much destruction. Back in February, a 174 to 220 feet asteroid—"2024 YR4"—was estimated to have a 3.1 percent chance of impacting the Earth in 2032, which was "the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger." A space rock this big could level a whole city upon impact with Earth. However, refined projections suggest that impact with Earth is very unlikely, and some scientists now believe that 2024 YR4 might be on its course to impact the moon in December 2032 instead. "Asteroid 2024 YR4 is now too far away to observe with either space or ground-based telescopes. NASA expects to make further observations when the asteroid's orbit around the Sun brings it back into the vicinity of Earth in 2028," NASA said. Additional data from the NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), shows that the probability of the asteroid impacting the Moon has increased slightly, from 3.8 percent to 4.3 percent. However, CNEOS also notes that even in the unlikely event that it does make an impact, this would not alter the Moon's orbit. Scientists from South Korea's Pusan National University recently studied another huge near-Earth asteroid—Bennu. This 1,640 feet wide space rock is predicted to have a one-in-2,700 chance of colliding with the Earth in the September of 2182. While an impact is very unlikely, the consequences of such could be catastrophic. The shock waves generated by the impact of the collision would cause earthquakes, wildfires and thermal radiation. It would also leave a large crater and eject debris upward. Atmospheric chemistry and global photosynthesis would be disrupted for between three to four years, as a result of the 100–400 million tons of dust that would be injected into the atmosphere due to the impact. The average surface temperature would decrease by around 7 degrees Fahrenheit, the average rainfall would fall by 15 percent, and the ozone layer would deplete by 32 percent. Even plant photosynthesis would decrease by between 20 and 30 percent. Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about asteroids? Let us know via science@
