FlashFeed

Full text

A rescue spacecraft is speeding toward a NASA telescope to prevent it from falling into Earth's atmosphere.

The first-of-its-kind mission launched at 5:09 a.m. EDT (0908 GMT) Thursday (July 2) from the Marshall Islands, carrying a robot-arm spacecraft named Link into the sky aboard a modified Lockheed Martin L-1011 airliner. In midair, a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket launched Link into orbit, where it will eventually rendezvous with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope that has been slowly falling toward Earth and headed for an untimely demise.

Link was developed by private company Katalyst Space for $30 million . Katalyst's goal is to meet up with the falling Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004, and pull it to a higher orbit, using Link's robotic arms and thrusters. Swift is still scientifically useful but is rapidly losing altitude due to the natural drag of Earth's atmosphere. Without help, Swift will likely meet its demise later this year, scientists say.

"This is a high-risk, high-reward mission," Shawn Domagal-Goldman , director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said in a statement . "We have much to gain by attempting this boost, which is more affordable than trying to replace Swift's capabilities, and allows NASA to advance the nation's satellite servicing industry, for the benefit of all."

Swift cost $250 million in 2004, which is roughly $450 million today when accounting for inflation — a relatively cheap observatory compared with the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope . The Swift mission was originally designed to study gamma-ray bursts ‪—‬ cosmic explosions that occur when a massive, dying star collapses into a black hole. Swift has made many observations of these bursts in the past 20-plus years while also watching for other signs of stellar activity, like X-ray flares or supernova explosions, as well as transient objects, like comets and asteroids .

In sum, Swift helps us see how the universe is changing over short periods.

"Swift is NASA's multitool when it comes to studying the cosmos," S. Bradley Cenko , Swift's principal investigator and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. "It observes the sky using a wide range of light, and rapidly points at short-lived outbursts, alerting other facilities in space and on the ground to help coordinate follow-up observations."

Katalyst engineers attach Link to a baseplate inside the Space Environment Simulator at NASA Goddard on April 28, 2026. The team practiced firing the satellite’s ion thrusters and operated one of the robotic arms while they cycled through space-like temperatures. (Image credit: NASA/Sophia Roberts) High-risk rescue mission

The rescue mission comes with several challenges. Swift was not designed to be serviced when it launched, making the logistics of the mission something of a puzzle. Moreover, NASA only gave the contract to Katalyst in September, after high solar activity in recent years ballooned Earth's atmosphere and unexpectedly accelerated the spacecraft's fall due to increased drag. This meant the mission had to be ready for space in less than a year after the usual punishing requirements of design, build and testing.

Katalyst accepted the challenge because the company hopes to do this kind of work more often. "If we're going to build an enduring presence beyond Earth, we need the capability to manipulate our environment in space," Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said in the statement. "That means deploying robotic spacecraft that can reposition, repair, refuel, and refit satellites after launch."

Unless Swift altered its operations plan, however, the spacecraft would have been irrecoverable in July. So, to give Link as much time as possible to rescue Swift, the operations team at Penn State's Eberly College of Science made some changes.

For example, Swift's science was minimized so that the spacecraft looks at targets only if the telescope is put in a "streamlined position" to minimize drag, NASA explained. Power consumption has also been slashed to let Swift's solar panels fly "in a more aerodynamic orientation," which also reduces the drag that is making the spacecraft fall into the atmosphere.

Related stories

Can we refuel 'dead' satellites in space? Bold new missions aim to try.

Falling metal space junk is changing Earth's upper atmosphere in ways we don't fully understand

Paperclip-sized spacecraft could visit a nearby black hole in the next century, study claims

These changes will allow Swift to stay above the minimum rescue altitude of 185 miles (298 kilometers) until autumn, agency models suggest. Katalyst will use that time to do the usual spacecraft "commissioning" on Link to make sure all systems are well. It will take Link about a month to rendezvous with Swift, according to NASA.

Following those steps, Link will approach Swift for evaluation, and Katalyst will use Link's robotic arms to latch onto the NASA observatory. Link will then use its propulsion system to gradually bring Swift's orbit to about 370 miles (595 km) ‪—‬ well above the pathway of the International Space Station, which orbits roughly 250 miles (400 km) over Earth.

NASA did not say how much longerSwift would be able to keep observing, should it reach its new altitude safely. However, figures from the European Space Agency suggest that spacecraft at an altitude of 310 miles (500 km) reenter the atmosphere within about 25 years. This would suggest that as long as Swift's instruments hold out, scientists would have many years of observations to look forward to.

Full text

Frederick Douglass’ great lecture “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” delivered on July 5th, 1852, to a predominantly white audience at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, captured the contradictions built into the nation’s July Fourth celebrations, then and to this day. The nation’s founding document may have declared that “All men are created equal,” but at the time of Douglass’ speech over three million Black people were enslaved. Douglass’ decision to deliver the speech on July 5th conveyed his view that the Fourth was not yet worth celebrating, for the holiday revealed to the American slave, “more than all other days in the year,” as Douglass put it, “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in 1865, but “What to the Slave” continues to speak to many readers about the gross injustice and cruelty of a nation that fails to offer equal opportunities and justice for all.

That speech, however, may not be the most compelling or even relevant of Douglass’ speeches for this year’s Fourth of July. A better candidate would be his 1867 “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” delivered after the Civil War on several occasions, including as part of a Black-sponsored lecture series in Philadelphia. Douglass took stock of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the democratic promise of the Declaration of Independence, and his concerns prophetically anticipate our present moment.

“Sources of Danger” was prompted by Douglass’ anger at President Andrew Johnson, whom he believed had betrayed the promise of Reconstruction by attempting to block all legislation intended to bring about racial equality. Though not delivered on or near July Fourth, the speech shares much of the holiday’s sentiment. Douglass begins with an appeal to “patriotic citizens of the United States,” and, stopping short of “Fourth-of-July extravagances,” he offers his “humble gratitude to the fathers who framed the nation’s founding documents.” (I quote from the version Douglass gave to the Black audience in Philadelphia on January 3, 1867.)

As in his more famous Fifth of July speech, Douglass laments the nation’s failure to live up to “the great principles of the Declaration of Independence.” In addition, he argues in “Sources of Danger” that the Constitution makes the presidency into something like a monarchy and thus a threat to democracy. Douglass concedes that there are electoral limits on the presidency, making it different from a monarchy. Nevertheless, the president, invested as he is with nearly unlimited power, “can reign long enough to commit any number of mischievous acts, and so defeat the most beneficent measures of our Government.”

How did it happen that some of the signers and supporters of the Declaration of Independence could create a government in which a president like Johnson is “invested with kingly powers”? Douglass speculates that the “fathers of this republic,” who were born under “monarchical institutions,” retained an unconscious nostalgia for monarchy. That nostalgia led to a key mistake in the Constitution—the elevation of the presidency to a kingship—which “must now be corrected.” As he instructs his audience, “You must have either a purely republican Government or you must have a monarchical Government, one or the other.” The burden of what could be called Douglass’ No-Kings speech is to identify the problem and suggest how to fix it.

Initially, the problem seems to be Andrew Johnson. Douglass states that the framers of the Constitution failed to anticipate a president like Johnson—a man willing to take full advantage of the lack of restraints on the presidency to become a “one-man power.” But even though Douglass refers to Johnson now and again, over the course of the speech he steps back in order to make a larger case about Constitutional failure and more disinterestedly offers his concerns about the nation’s future presidents and prospects.

“King Andy,” illustration by Thomas Nast. From Harper’s Weekly , November 1, 1866.

Douglass first calls attention to how the Constitution puts “ immense patronage in the hands of the President.” The president, he observes, has access to “hundred millions of dollars per annum in times of peace, and uncounted thousands of millions in times of war.” There are only limited constraints on how he might use the money. He can use it to advance his own policies or even to enrich himself and assume power over others. Douglass is particularly concerned about how easily the president can distribute the nation’s money “among his political friends.” At the thought, Douglass can only throw up his hands and declare: “What a power! What a corrupting power!”

And there’s more: Douglass calls attention to the corruption enabled by the president’s veto power. He is outraged that a single person—the president—can overrule a simple majority of congressional legislators. The idea that the president always out-votes an under two-thirds congressional majority is “an absurdity,” Douglass says, as well as an affront to democracy. Douglass leaves no doubt about what he thinks should be done to address the anti-democratic presidential veto: “I want that old, despotic, and aristocratic power of our Government utterly banished from our Constitution. It has no business in a republican form of government.” Even in England, Douglass points out, no such power is invested in the monarchy.

Even though Douglass refers to Johnson now and again, over the course of the speech he steps back in order to make a larger case about Constitutional failure and more disinterestedly offers his concerns about the nation’s future presidents and prospects.

Douglass next turns to the president’s pardoning power as yet another source of danger. He does not want to eliminate the possibility of pardons, but he sees corruption as the inevitable result of the president’s absolute right to grant them. In Douglass’ time, he was particularly angry about Johnson’s decision to pardon nearly all of the leaders of the former Confederacy. As a political theorist, however, he looked into the future and was especially concerned about how unrestricted pardons added to presidential power. With the help of the Constitution, a president’s ability to pardon felons could be deployed “to win personal friends and co-operation and alliance, instead of loyal obedience to the laws of the land.”

Among Douglass’ suggestions for limiting presidential power, perhaps the most pertinent for our present historical moment is his call to abolish the president’s ability to undertake “secret diplomacy.” which puts the nation at risk. As Douglass warns, a bad president will choose a bad cabinet, and with “a bad President and a bad Cabinet” doing the secretive diplomatic work, “this nation might be conducted into the jaws of a terrible war, and be perfectly helpless.”

Andrew Johnson, the immediate focus of Douglass’ critique, was impeached that next year. Douglass thought he should have been convicted for crimes against Black people, but he was impeached for something very different: his violation of the Tenure of Office Act by firing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. But was impeachment the best response to the problem? In “Sources of Danger” Douglass insists that broad constitutional change, rather than rituals of impeachment, would help to insure the future of the country.

Even in an angry and at times despairing speech like “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” Douglass retained hope for the future, calling on Americans to secure the democratic promise of the nation. “Strike down the one-man power everywhere,” he says at the speech’s conclusion; “make your Government lean to the people, and away from the individual or the one-man power.” If Americans are willing to do that, through constitutional reform or other means, “you make sure the permanence, prosperity, and glory of this great republic.” This is Douglass’ wish and request to us from 1867. As in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” he reminds Americans of the still unfulfilled egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence, and there is no better time for such a reminder than July Fourth.

Full text

Something stinks in California’s climate policies.

Years ago, the state set up a system that pays cattle farmers across the country to turn the methane emitted from cattle manure into natural gas, encouraging the dairy sector to produce a gas we burn instead of one that just pollutes the air.

It’s become wildly popular because the subsidies are extremely lucrative. But a growing body of research suggests the program is a case study in the shortcomings of our preferred approaches to climate action. Instead of simply forcing industries to directly cut their pollution or pay for it as a cost of doing business, legislators have repeatedly opted to set up convoluted incentive systems that swap climate responsibilities between parties and regions. As studies have shown again and again, these carbon offsetting and trading schemes often dramatically overstate the emissions reductions actually achieved in the one place that matters: the atmosphere.

The dairy program illustrates a particular version of this problem, muddling the impacts of different types of greenhouse gases in a way that researchers argue will lock in more warming in the future.

Despite this and other concerns, California regulators decided in 2024 to extend parts of the program beyond 2050. And a recent proposal by the state’s air resources board could send millions of additional dollars to dairy farmers as part of a plan that would ease restrictions on major greenhouse-gas producers.

Here’s how the system works: The state’s climate regulations require the transportation fuels industry to lower the carbon dioxide levels in its products over time—or purchase credits from other parties that cut fuel emissions, including cattle farmers.

Dairies generally spray cattle manure into giant open lagoons, where microbes gobble up organic matter and produce methane as a by-product. But if farmers set up what are known as anaerobic digesters, the sludge is redirected into covered vessels that capture the biogas, which can be converted into natural gas and injected into a pipeline. It can then be used to fuel certain vehicles or generate electricity in a power plant. Either way, petroleum companies can pay those farmers for Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) credits, to meet regulatory requirements in lieu of reducing the emissions from their own fuels.

Burning biogas in a bus or turbine still releases carbon dioxide, but the idea is that this process reduces market demand to extract natural gas from the ground and avoids the release of methane, which is a far more powerful greenhouse gas (at least initially). In fact, methane is so much more powerful that under California’s program, “adding one average biogas-powered vehicle to the fleet would produce enough LCFS credits to cover the deficits incurred by 26 similar gasoline-powered vehicles,” according to Aaron Smith, a UC Berkeley economist.

But there’s a problem with this carbon math. California assumes that methane exerts about 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. That’s not how it really works in the atmosphere, though.

Methane is very powerful, but it also breaks down quickly, generally within a couple of decades. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide builds up cumulatively in the atmosphere—and much of whatever we emit will continue heating up the planet for hundreds to thousands of years.

So, in effect, the state has created a system that reduces short-term warming at the cost of increasing all-but-permanent warming. Any methane that digesters capture today would have caused extra-powerful warning if released, but by 2050 that effect would have mostly faded away. Meanwhile, that additional carbon dioxide we permitted in its place could continue warming the world for millennia.

It is a good idea to cut methane emissions, and dairy digesters achieve this (though not always as effectively as hoped). But we can’t swap a decrease in short-lived greenhouse gases for an increase in long-lived ones if we hope to keep global temperatures within relatively safe levels in the coming century, as researchers have long warned. We have to slash both.

The problem I keep returning to, after years of covering carbon markets and offsets, is this: We need to clean up every sector, completely, over the next few decades. It’s increasingly untenable for so many of our climate ambitions to turn on getting one industry to make progress on paper by paying another one to reduce emissions, at a point when every business in every industry needs to be racing toward net zero.

It’s time to move past the idea that we need to reward sectors for doing us the favor of not polluting the atmosphere, and simply require them to stop unloading the huge environmental burden of their business onto society.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review ’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here .