Tag: nasa

NASA shamed into firing top DEI executive after trying to ‘hide’ her

The chief DEI officer at NASA‘s jet propulsion lab was fired after her title was changed to hide her from Donald Trump‘s war on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. 

Trump and ‘First Buddy’ Elon Musk have been happy warriors against DEI, working to rid the federal government of what they call unfair practices.

Neela Rajendra had run the lab’s central diversity office, at one point arguing that having deadlines for work projects undermine inclusion, according to The Washington Free Beacon.

However, amid a series of 900 job cuts due to budgeting issues made in 2024, the diversity office was cut but Rajendra was mysteriously kept on. 

She’d had all references to DEI washed from from her title but reportedly kept many of the same job duties as ‘head of employee success.’Expand article logo  Continue reading

In early March, Rajendra was still in charge of the lab’s ‘Black Excellence Strategic Team.’ 

However, earlier this week in response to reports she was being protected from Trump administration DEI cuts, the lab parted ways with Rajendra. 

‘Neela Rajendra is no longer working at [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. We are incredibly grateful for the lasting impact she made to our organization. We wish her the very best,’ lab director Laurie Leshin wrote in an all-staff email on Thursday.

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‘Impossible’ Device Physicists Said Wouldn’t Work Just Generated Electricity from the Earth’s Rotation

Scientists from Princeton University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have invented a device that seemingly generates electricity from the Earth’s rotation.

Although generally accepted theories show that generating electricity from a uniform field like Earth’s magnetic field is impossible, the team believes they have found a “loophole” that allows their device to generate tiny but measurable amounts of electricity.

If independent reviews can confirm the team’s work, they say the next steps to building a practical energy-generating device would involve miniaturization and scaling efforts, as proposed in a new paper detailing their current efforts.

Device That Generates Electricity from the Earth’s Rotation Joins Alternative Energy Revolution

The research joins a list of promising new approaches to generating electricity, ranging from “extreme enzymes” or other living organisms to “smart” windows and triboelectric-driven “rain panels” that generate electricity from raindrops.

Other efforts include generating electricity from radio waves, sweat, advanced metamaterials, and ocean waves, including an effort to produce energy from waves at the grid scale. One particularly novel concept uses the classic “drinking bird” toy to generate power with each dip of its beak.

In an email to The Debrief, Princeton University Professor Christopher Chyba noted that his previous work with study co-author and co-inventor, JPL’s Dr. Kevin Hand, was designed to explore the possible electromagnetic heating of astrophysical objects. That theoretical work, Chyba explained, was not intended to have any practical application.

“Curiosity-driven basic research is often what later leads to practical applications,” the professor said. “A lot of basic research initially seems disconnected from our daily lives—but it’s a key component underlying American science and technology.”

However, Chyba explained that as those theoretical studies progressed, the work “led us to begin asking questions that we then realized could be investigated in the laboratory.”

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NASA says Trump is responsible for stranded astronaut saga ending: ‘It would not have happened’

NASA is crediting President Donald Trump for spearheading the mission to bring back its stranded astronauts.

Bethany Stevens, a spokeswoman for the agency, spoke glowingly about the new administration’s role.

‘It would not have happened without President Trump’s intervention,’ she told Fox News Digital, adding that it was a ‘huge win for the Trump administration.’

The extended space mission entered the political spotlight in January, when Trump said he told Elon Musk to ‘go get’ the astronauts who had been ‘virtually abandoned’ by the Biden administration. 

Musk echoed this statement, and in February, the two of them doubled down on their claims by blaming the astronauts’ delayed return on ‘political reasons.’ 

Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were only supposed to be on the ISS for eight days, but ended up staying for more than nine months due to technical issues with their spacecraft, Boeing’s Starliner.

Williams and Wilmore finally returned to Earth on March 18, splashing down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida inside the SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon capsule.

Once the two astronauts were on the ground, NASA officials praised the Trump administration for the success and timing of their return. 

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX Capsule Docks With ISS To Rescue Stranded Boeing Astronauts

SpaceX delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) early Sunday as part of a NASA crew rotation mission that will bring home two Boeing Starliner astronauts stranded on the ISS for eight months. The lengthy delay occurred because the Biden-Harris regime sought to avoid optically displeasing headlines about Elon Musk rescuing the astronauts before the presidential election last November.

A little more than one day after launching from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on Friday evening, the Crew-10 astronauts’ SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked at the ISS early Sunday morning. 

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov entered the ISS shortly after opening the hatches between the ISS and the Dragon spacecraft around 0035ET.

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CBS News Makes It Sound Like Abandoned Astronauts Were On Vacation

Reporting on Elon Musk’s SpaceX mission to rescue the two astronauts stranded on the ISS, CBS News made it sound like they have been on an extended holiday.

This X post linking to a story notes that NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have had a “9 month stay in space.”

Then within the story itself, CBS states “NASA’s next International Space Station crew blasted off Friday, finally clearing the way for Starliner astronauts Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Sunita Williams to be ferried home next week by two other outgoing station crew members, finally closing out an extended space odyssey.”

The pair were not inter-railing around Europe, they were left in space by the Biden administration on purpose after the Boeing Starliner capsule they travelled in was deemed unsafe for return.

They were supposed to be in space eight days, and could have been brought back months ago by Musk, but the Biden administration refused his offer of help, presumably because he had endorsed Trump.

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FAA, NASA, NOAA Admit Jets Spray Chemicals That Linger in the Sky, Alter Weather

A newly released document titled “Contrails Research Roadmap 2025,” published by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), NASA, and NOAA, lays out plans for “routine, system-wide contrail management” by 2050.

Now, to be clear, the government isn’t calling these “chemtrails.”

They refer to them as “contrails,” but what they describe in this document is functionally the same thing people like me have been reporting on for years.

Jets spraying substances that linger in the sky, alter the weather, and affect temperature on the Earth—whether intentional or not, this is an admission of widespread atmospheric manipulation, dressed up as a side effect rather than a deliberate operation.

According to the government document itself, there are two types of persistent contrails that can last for hours to days and have significant impacts on the atmosphere:

Persistent Non-Spreading Contrails

These “can remain visible and retain their linear features for hours to days.”

The document explains they “form in ice supersaturated regions of the atmosphere and are likely to be more impactful than short-lived contrails.”

The agencies even admit they are “easily identified from the ground and satellites as being formed from aviation activity.”

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NASA’s Stranded Astronauts Confirm Biden Abandoned Them in Space — He Declined Elon Musk’s Rescue Offer For ‘Political Reasons’

NASA’s stranded astronauts have acknowledged that Joe Biden deliberately abandoned them in space for political purposes.

Barry Wilmore and his crewmate Sunita Williams have been stuck on the International Space Station since July last year after their Boeing Starliner ran into technical issues.

At a virtual press conference on Tuesday, Wilmore was asked about Elon Musk’s claim that Joe Biden declined his offer to bring them back on a SpaceX flight several months ago for “political reasons.”

“I can only say that Mr Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual,” Wilmore said.

Wilmore went on to say he and his partner at the “utmost respect” for Musk and Trump.

I can tell you, at the outset, all of us have the utmost respect for Mr. Musk, and obviously respect and admiration for our President of the United States, Donald Trump.

We appreciate them, we appreciate all they do for us, for human spaceflight, for our nation. We’re thankful that they’re in the positions they’re in.

The words they’ve said — politics — I mean, that’s part of life. We understand that, and there’s an important reason why we have a political system, and the political system that we do have.

And we’re behind it 100 percent. We know what we’ve lived up here. We know the ins and outs and the specifics that they may not be privy to.

And I’m sure they have some issues that they’re dealing with, information that they have that we are not privy to.

So when I think about your question, that’s part of life. We are on board with it, we support our nation, we support our nation’s leaders and we’re thankful for them.

During an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience last week, Musk explained how Biden had declined his offer and intentionally “pushed the return date past the inauguration date.”

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Heads Are Going to Explode When DOGE Cancels This Boondoggle

Boeing Vice President David Dutcher warned workers on the company’s Space Launch System (SLS) to prepare for layoffs on Friday if NASA finally cancels the rocket providing lift for the Artemis lunar program. The political fallout could make heads explode. 

Eric Burger has the details on Dutcher’s emergency all-hands meeting, but they aren’t all that interesting. What is interesting is what happens when and if a team led by SpaceX founder Elon Musk tries to cancel a multibillion-dollar project led by Boeing.

Artemis is the U.S.-led international effort to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon, but to borrow a New England expression, we “can’t get there from here” on the rocket built for the job —which is where DOGE’s budget-cutting chops come in.

SLS isn’t just a boring and stupid name for an impressively sized rocket; it’s underpowered and too expensive for its intended mission. SLS can’t put enough mass into lunar orbit to account for the Orion space capsule it carries and its four-person crew and their supplies. It doesn’t even carry the landing vehicle.

To make up for SLS’s shortcomings, we’re going to build Lunar Gateway — an international space station in orbit around the moon. The plan is that Orion and its crew will dock at the Gateway and transfer to a SpaceX Human Landing System (HLS, and another boring name) for transit to the lunar surface, where they’ll conduct their mission, and then back to the Gateway for transfer back to Orion for the voyage back to Earth. HLS gets to Lunar Gateway courtesy of a SpaceX Starship.

Did you get all that? There will be a quiz later.

The complexity is only necessary because SLS can’t produce enough lift. Starship, once completed, can produce enough lift, making the Lunar Gateway and all that going back and forth unnecessary.

The Lunar Gateway is expected to cost $5.3 billion just for initial construction (and we both know what happens to those initial estimates; they go nowhere but up) and another billion dollars each year to operate and maintain.

Maybe there’s a case to be made for Artemis to include an orbital substation, but it isn’t Lunar Gateway. 

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NASA ends DEI programs that ‘wasted taxpayers dollars and resulted in shameful discrimination’

NASA has ended its diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEI) programs after all federal agencies were directed to ‘terminate’ the initiatives.

Staff received an email Wednesday from acting administrator Janet Petro, which said the space agency is ‘taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump’s executive orders.’

The order is titled ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing and Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.’ 

NASA’s email admitted that ‘these programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.’

The space agency has spent at least $22.4 million annually on such programs.

DailyMail.com had uncovered millions of taxpayer dollars were dished out for DEI data analytics and to help the agency ’embark on a venture to incorporate and deeply engrain diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility in the culture and business.’

Petro, who is the first woman to lead NASA as its acting administrator, also urged staff to report colleagues who have attempted to disguise DEI programs with coded language.

‘There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information,’ the email reads. ‘However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.’

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