Latest news with #SarahJeong
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
If NASA Had Blown Up This Many Rockets, The Government Would Have Cancelled the Space Program
As an institution, the Pentagon has come to be known for many things over the years — its transparency, its generosity, its cunning. Consistency is not one of them. SpaceX, a private company with a valuation of over $350 billion, is currently coasting off billions of dollars in Pentagon launch programs. Based on contracts in force in 2025, the company will now carry out the majority of US military space launches until at least 2036. But in the wake of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's latest disastrous Starship failure — the company's third in a row — some are wondering if we weren't better off when space flight wasn't beholden to the whims of a few billionaires, but as a national project under NASA. "Weren't we NOT blowing up rockets, like, 50 years ago," asked The Verge features editor Sarah Jeong on social media. "Also weren't we like 'ah yeah that was a fail' when the rocket fell apart instead of calling it a 'partial success,'" she asked, referencing Musk's insistence that the latest explosion, as usual, was a "big improvement." "I understand the part about the 'cost-savings by outsourcing to theoretically nimbler private sector' and the 'cuts to NASA' but also," Jeong pondered, "the rockets keep exploding. Didn't they used to not explode." Both NASA and SpaceX have different objectives — NASA to investigate (and militarize) air and space, SpaceX to colonize Mars for the glory of corporate capitalism — making direct comparisons tricky. Still, there are some objective differences in the way both agencies pursue their goals that are worth looking into, especially as the US government maintains a financial obligation to both. As UChicago tech policy scholar Uchenna Andrew Offorjebe pined on Bluesky, "NASA was not allowed to fail in the same ways that SpaceX does." While failure can be the name of the game when it comes to spaceflight innovations, it's fair to say SpaceX would crumble under the immense pressure put on NASA by the US government throughout the Cold War. Contrary to popular belief, throughout the 1960s, the years of the famous Apollo program, polls fluctuated from 45-60 percent in favor of cutting of Congress's spending on NASA. Though cold warriors in Washington didn't always follow the will of the public, they still maintained intense scrutiny of NASA's budget, even as the agency put men on the Moon. In 1965, for example, NASA was forced to appeal to Congress for funding for projects like its solid-fuel rocket program — the propulsion system now undergirding the nation's ICBM arsenal — when Defense budget examiners gutted support for NASA's joint rocket programs. The reason wasn't some earth-shattering launch catastrophe, but NASA's inability to "quantify the noneconomic benefits of space exploration," according to NASA historian Arnold Levine. This Pentagon withdrawal was despite US President Lindon Johnson's congressional space report, where he called 1965 the "most successful year in our history." (This was the year of the US's first two-man spaceflight, the first American spacewalk, first orbital rendezvous, and a new record set for longest duration of a manned spaceflight, among other achievements.) SpaceX is under no such scrutiny by Pentagon budget hawks, even as it becomes integral to US Defense agencies. Judging by Musk's own metrics — not just reaching Mars, but building a million-person colony by 2044 — the private company is lagging way behind its childlike ambitions. In the meantime, it's burning through about $1.5 billion a year on the joint Starbase and Starship program alone, according to the Wall Street Journal. Though SpaceX is currently profitable thanks almost entirely to Starlink, a subscription-based satellite internet service, the company's future hinges on Starship. Without a viable Starship, the company's $1.6 billion in outstanding debt will only grow as the launch debris piles up. When that happens, the Pentagon's contracts will likely ensure that SpaceX is too big to fail — great news for Musk, bad news for US taxpayers, and a curious contradiction in a supposedly free-market system. More on SpaceX: Former NASA Astronaut Says Elon Musk Has No Idea What He's Talking About
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Yahoo
The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women
The New York Times published an article this week with a strange and bigoted claim about Asian women. The claim came when the newspaper reported, in line with the industry consensus, that for Apple to move any serious amount of iPhone production to the United States from Asia would result in making its gadgets prohibitively expensive. That's true, for reasons ranging from the United States' lack of specialized manufacturing equipment to its lack of properly trained workers. But alongside those reality-based issues, the NYT decided to throw in some bizarre race science. "Young Chinese women have small fingers," the article reads, "and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said." For one thing, it's not even clear that the claim that Chinese women have small fingers is even true. Research on global hand size is lacking, but one study found that the average Chinese person has a hand size approximately equal to that of the average German. An analysis of hand size around the world, though it didn't include China, found that even the largest average differences in women's hand size between countries was negligible. And even if it was true, there doesn't seem to be a lick of evidence — or, for that matter, even anyone online making the claim — that small hands are preferable for manufacturing small devices. The closest thing we could find was a paper that found that surgeons with smaller hands actually had a harder time manipulating dextrous operating tools, which would seem to contradict the NYT's claim that small hands are an advantage for small specialized movements. Unsurprisingly, the NYT's bigoted claim went viral. One particularly compelling counterargument that emerged there: the smartphone repair technicians who engage in microsoldering fixes for broken iPhones are often men, and their larger fingers don't seem to be causing any issues. "My favorite part is that [there are] adult men, in America, that do iPhone repair, and they often do repair tasks much more intricate than what assembly requires," one user noted. "Like nobody even thought about this for a second." Sarah Jeong, an editor at The Verge whose outrage at the NYT's assertion helped propel it to virality, pointed out that men do all kinds of skillful tasks on a tiny scale — such as for Warhammer 40K and other role-playing games that require users to hand-paint tabletop minifigurines. "Grown ass men with sausage fingers are also out there painting tiny dolls using nail art brushes so they can play house... with their friends," Jeong joked. "American men have plenty of manual dexterity." Julia Carrie Wong, a senior reporter at The Guardian who also blasted the wild take, revealed that she emailed the newspaper to give them a piece of her mind. In response, a communications director there told her that the NYT "does not make racial or genetic generalizations" and was simply "[citing] experts who have experience with the industrial process in US and Chinese factories." That's a pretty wild claim even on its face: that the NYT is publishing race science based on anonymous experts. It also raises an ugly possibility: that the newspaper's use of the word "young" to describe the Chinese women working in Apple factories was supposed to insinuate something dark. Apple has a long history of getting caught employing child labor at its factories, who actually would have smaller fingers because they were minors — so it could be, whether the NYT understood it or not, that its "experts" were simply winking at the reality that it's hard to build affordable gadgets in a country with robust labor rights. More on Apple outrage: Apple's AI-Powered Siri Is Such a Disaster That Employees Have Given the Team Developing It a Rude Nickname
