2026-04-18 19:30:00
Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again.
The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.
No human has set foot on the moon since 1972, and the landing gear that facilitated the Apollo missions isn’t compatible with the modern rockets or NASA’s goal of longer-term exploration—humans have spent a total of just over three days ambling around the lunar surface. Since the inception of the Artemis project, NASA has contracted with SpaceX, currently Musk’s most profitable company, to design more expansive landing equipment.
NASA has always relied on partnerships with private companies, but the number of unique contractors has dropped by 38 percent between 2021 and 2024 as contracts with SpaceX ballooned. According to a Washington Post investigation, Musk’s company has received nearly $15 billion from the agency all told, with contract values doubling at the inception of Artemis.
“Musk can do basically whatever he wants with the rocket launches.”
“NASA helped build out SpaceX,” says Casey Drier, who leads the space policy team at the Planetary Society. In some ways, he sees this relationship as an exemplar of how NASA aims to interact with private companies; the partnership, he says, “has significantly lowered launch costs, increased reliability, and pursued real innovation in reusability.”
But SpaceX contracting also represents a worst-case scenario. A former NASA financial officer found that while the company had driven down the cost of launching things into space, it wasn’t passing those savings along to NASA. Even adjusting for inflation, SpaceX has been charging NASA more each year for the same services. And it can keep raising prices, because it has put competing ventures out of business. This one company “now facilitates US access to space,” Drier says.
The technologies that allowed SpaceX to leap ahead were developed using federal funds, yet Musk owns the rights to them. “Musk can do basically whatever he wants with the rocket launches to space, something previously only the domain of national superpowers,” Drier says. “The government, by policy, concentrated immense power in the hands of a single individual.”
The value of the Artemis contracts have grown over the last year as NASA, like other federal scientific agencies, finds itself in a tricky position. Because Congress rejected the president’s proposed budget cuts, NASA has the funding to carry out its missions—a $24.4 billion annual budget, plus a bump of nearly $10 billion over the next six years from the One Big Beautiful Bill. But their staff took a large hit at the hands of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The agency lost about 20 percent of its workforce, including many senior and specialized employees trained to support highly technical missions like getting back to the moon. This scenario “almost certainly will increase reliance on contractors,” Drier says—though DOGE ended many NASA contracts as well.
In the name of efficiency, the Trump administration also eliminated NASA’s entire Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, whose economists analyzed and managed NASA’s relationship with the space technology market. This included assessing contracts, which typically cost taxpayers more than in-house work—especially when there’s no competition.
This doesn’t leave NASA many places to turn when the company of a billionaire who famously overpromises doesn’t deliver. An analysis from the NASA Office of the Inspector General expressed concerns that SpaceX would not even be able to meet the already extended deadlines for the moon lander, especially as there is “little margin for error in completing the remaining work.”
To keep the Artemis III mission on track for mid-2027, NASA is “exploring options for accelerating lander development,” per the IG report. So far, this has meant soliciting proposals from the only two companies with the capacity to work on such gear. One is SpaceX. The other is Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin, which is already two years behind on its contracts for Artemis V.
2026-04-18 19:00:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Picture yourself in a windswept forest. Leaves are rustling and trunks are creaking as trees sway to and fro. This oscillation might seem precarious, but it’s actually an ancient adaptation: If pines and firs and all the others were perfectly stiff, a gust would snap them. So instead, they flex.
Now teleport yourself to the top floor of a skyscraper during the same windstorm, ever so slightly bending in the same way. A tree’s clever evolutionary trick, you see, has made the modern metropolis possible: As towers reached higher and higher in the early 20th century, architects used not wood but steel to create giants that would similarly flex in hurricane-force winds and as earthquakes rattled their foundations.
But as the world gets hotter and wildfires more intense, architects are turning back to trees for more than inspiration. Engineered materials like cross-laminated and glue-laminated timber, in which layers of wood are glued together, create beams that are tough and somewhat flexible, yet lightweight. They’re so strong, in fact, that designers are crafting wood structures that are 15, 20, even 25 stories high: In 2022, the 284-foot Ascent MKE Building opened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, becoming the world’s tallest timber building.
It’s exactly because the world is getting hotter that architects are pushing the limits of how tall they can build with “mass timber,” as it’s known in the field: As trees grow, they capture planet-warming carbon, which is then permanently incorporated into the edifice. To that end, last month crews completed a 10-story building in Vancouver, called the Hive, which is now North America’s tallest brace-framed, seismic-force-resisting (meaning it shrugs off earthquakes) timber structure. “I think we’re going back to how we used to build, which was with more wood,” Lindsay Duthie, an architect at Dialog, the firm that designed the property.
For thousands of years, humans were stuck with natural building materials: wood, adobe, granite. The industrial revolution unlocked the power of steel, but at an environmental cost, as its production has spewed heaps of carbon. Laminated timber, on the other hand, is not only more environmentally friendly, but also perfectly safe for structures much larger than your house.
Because this resource is engineered, it can come from small- and medium-sized trees. That is, instead of having to form single beams from huge old-growth behemoths, bits can be sliced, layered, and glued together. This harvesting can help improve forest health, as agencies like the US Forest Service remove some stands to prevent overcrowding and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. (A long modern history of suppressing fires has nixed the ecosystem’s natural way of thinning itself. Lightning strikes, for instance, would ignite blazes that cleared out some vegetation while leaving the forest intact. This spurred new growth and attracted grazing animals like deer, boosting biodiversity.)
While it takes a lot of work to mine and process the iron needed to make steel—a process that scars the landscape—wood structures use material from ecosystems that, if managed properly, can keep growing more cross-laminated timber for more construction.
The Hive, though, can’t resist seismic forces with wood alone. It’s equipped with Tectonus dampers, which are essentially giant shock absorbers that dissipate energy and recenter the building after an earthquake. Elsewhere, on a large shake table at the University of California, San Diego, researchers deployed a different technique in a 10-story timber structure. At the building’s core sat a large piece of mass timber, called a rocking wall, anchored to the foundation with high-strength steel rods. The researchers simulated 88 earthquakes, and the timber building survived them all with no damage. “It performed phenomenally,” said Shiling Pei, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.
That structural integrity is not only important for keeping occupants safe, but for sustaining the sustainability of a mass timber structure. If an earthquake damages a building, repairing it will result in CO2 emissions. Worse, you may have to demolish the structure and start from scratch. A properly designed timber building can capture carbon in its wood—and keep it there for years and years. “You build not only a sustainable structure, but also a resilient structure,” said Alessandro Palermo, a structural engineer at the University of California, San Diego, who studies mass timber.
Which is all not to say that one of these wooden buildings is fully devoid of steel. The timber beams are attached with metal brackets, for instance. And timber buildings still sit on sturdy foundations of concrete, the production of which releases enormous amounts of carbon, though engineers are working to make it more environmentally friendly.
But isn’t building a giant structure out of wood just asking for it to go up in flames? No, because building regulators in British Columbia or anywhere else wouldn’t approve these plans if they were excessively flammable. And laminated timber is designed to form a protective char layer if it catches on fire, insulating the structural integrity of a beam from the flames. “If you have a campfire, you end up at the end of the night with black logs,” Duthie said. “That’s the char layer that actually acts as a protective coating that prevents it from burning further.”
And compared to the sterility of exposed steel and concrete in a building’s interior spaces, wood has a fundamentally different feel for the occupants. “It has a tactile quality about it that people sort of want to interact with,” said Katie Mesia, firmwide design resilience co-leader at the architecture company Gensler. “I think that is just part of who we are as humans. That desire to be close to nature has always been there.”
One day soon, then, you might find yourself safely in a mass timber building—the evolutionary brilliance of a forest repackaged with human ingenuity.
2026-04-18 15:00:00
In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.
The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.
The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry.
This week on Reveal, we join 13 other news outlets to expose the secrets of a global surveillance empire.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2025.
2026-04-18 06:24:11
Hasan Piker’s name is everywhere. Not because he won an election or passed legislation. Not because he’s a big sports star or an astronaut. It’s because he won’t stop yapping—and scores of people won’t stop listening. Depending on who you ask, he’s either one of the most dangerous voices in American politics—or one of the most honest.
Piker, an avowed Marxist, is among the loudest voices on the American left. His megaphone is a Twitch stream where he spends roughly eight hours a day, seven days a week, breaking down political news to an audience that skews young and male. He’s blunt, frequently crass, and deeply influential. There seems to be a profile of him every other day. (One such New York Times headline: “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’”.) Time named him on its Top 100 Creators list. All of this is why certain factions of the Democratic Party have spent the last several weeks trying to make him a liability for the candidates he supports, pointing to off-color, if not offensive, comments he’s made over the years as evidence that he’s too toxic to touch.
So I sat down with him.
We talked about why Fox News can’t stop covering him—and why he thinks that’s a gift. We talked about the ideological fault lines inside the Democratic Party, what he actually believes about Israel and Zionism, and why people can’t stop talking about him. “We’re on the fourth week now,” he jokes. “Like, why are you still talking about me? I’m irrelevant.” We don’t think so, Hasan.
2026-04-18 04:02:32
The AI infrastructure reckoning has until recently stayed local, its battles fought in the relatively puny arenas of town council and zoning commission meetings. But the pushback to hyperscale data centers has now stepped onto a larger stage: this week, Maine’s legislature passed the nation’s first state-level hyperscale data center moratorium, freezing construction approvals for data centers requiring more than 20 megawatts of power—the level of massive computing facilities required to train and deploy AI models—for the next year and a half.
In Maine, electricity bills have already increased by 58 percent on average over the last 5 years. Much of that price jump is likely due to the state’s reliance on natural gas—but some Mainers fear that data center buildout will only increase their expenses.
By pressing pause on data centers, says Dan Diorio, who represents the industry lobbying group Data Center Coalition, Maine is missing out on money. “A statewide moratorium on data centers would discourage investment and send a signal that Maine is closed for business,” he said in a statement. “It would deprive local communities of the opportunity to compete for investment and jobs, while forcing Maine to relinquish significant long-term economic investment.”
Democratic state Rep. Melanie Sachs, who sponsored the measure, doesn’t buy it. “Frankly, the tradeoffs have not been shown to be of benefit to our ratepayers, water usage or community benefit in terms of economic activity,” Sachs told the Associated Press.
These facilities can strain the electric grid and pollute the air—the NAACP is now suing Elon Musk’s xAI for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act by using gas-burning turbines to power data centers in Memphis—while further enriching some of the world’s wealthiest men. Data center developers promise that they’ll bring economic benefits to the places where they build. But although they consistently receive millions of dollars in tax breaks, they are legally allowed to shield many of the financial details of their operation from state regulators. That makes it difficult to tell whether or not they’ll actually yield dividends for the communities in which they build.
Arjun Krishnaswami, who studies data center energy use at the Federation of American Scientists, says moratorium bills like Maine’s show that “tech companies failed to demonstrate that they are taking those risks seriously.” Their sales pitch, Krishnaswami said, isn’t working—in part because of a lack of transparency.
“They’re so secretive,” said Greg LeRoy of the corporate accountability research organization Good Jobs First. “They come in under LLCs and code names, they insist on non-disclosure agreements—as long as they’re acting like they have to come in the dark of the night, it just makes you ask, what are they hiding? And the answer is, it’s a bad deal.”
Maine’s moratorium bill represents a “seismic shift in public opinion,” LeRoy said. Data center construction is a massive industry, representing about 3 percent of US GDP growth in the past year. The electricity demands of data centers used for AI could increase as much as 165 percent by 2030—and President Donald Trump has thrown his weight behind building them big and fast.
But the data center opposition is growing, too: beyond Maine, twelve additional states are now considering legislative moratoriums on data center construction, and dozens of municipalities have already passed such laws. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a proposal for a nationwide moratorium in late March. “A year ago, nobody was entertaining a moratorium,” LeRoy said. “Now a fourth of the states are.”
There are some ways data center developers could sweeten the deal. “Tech companies are not very sensitive to the price of electricity,” Krishnaswami said. Instead, they’re more interested in how fast they can get things built. That gives policymakers a chance to make AI infrastructure companies pay a premium for the electricity they use—cash that could then be reinvested into “clean energy, direct bill reductions, or other social programs that could directly benefit people.” But right now, that’s not what he’s seeing. “They’ve failed to demonstrate that they’re committed to figuring out how to really, truly, benefit the nearby communities, and take accountability for negative impacts.”
2026-04-18 03:16:08
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should be feeling optimistic. He’s a member of the 6-3 Republican-appointed majority on the highest court that is rapidly reshaping American law in a way Thomas has always wanted. To name a few of his recent victories, Thomas and his colleagues have ended the constitutional right to abortion, banned affirmative action in higher education, helped Donald Trump return to the White House, and this term are expected to toss out what’s left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For a reactionary like Thomas, things are going very well.
And yet, Thomas is worried. Maybe even mad. In a radical speech that drew headlines for its thinly-veiled animosity toward his fellow judges, fellow conservatives, and political opponents to his left, Thomas warned that the nation’s founding ethos that “all men are created equal” is under threat. His remarks, delivered at the University of Texas at Austin this week, pit the ideals of the Declaration of Independence against the scourge of “progressivism.” As Thomas warned, “It is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”
Press reports were rightly attuned to Thomas’ incendiary rhetoric and the fact that this was no ordinary speech for a Supreme Court justice. But the quick dispatches missed the critical historic and legal context of Thomas’ remarks—and just what they may foreshadow.
Thomas goes further than attacking agencies as undemocratic—to him, they are contrary to God.
Thomas’ speech, pegged to this year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, comes in three parts. First, Thomas framed the revolutionary document as evidence that American law is not grounded in a legal text but rather comes from a higher power: that people’s equality is “endowed by their Creator” and that their “unalienable” rights come from God. “The Constitution is the means of government,” Thomas said. “It is the Declaration that announces the ends of government.”
This is nothing new from Thomas, who has been a fan of this “natural law” theory—the idea that there’s a superior moral code through which the Constitution must be interpreted—for decades. The danger in this theological approach is that an adherent might replace the dictates of a statute or the Constitution with his theologically-informed preference. At Thomas’s confirmation hearing in 1991, then-Sen. Joe Biden pressed the nominee on his many endorsements of natural law theory. At the time, liberals and Democrats were most worried that Thomas would use a natural law approach to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I don’t see a role for the use of natural law in constitutional adjudication,” Thomas swore in the hearings.
Today, he’s no longer downplaying the theory. “Justice Thomas is engaging in some strong natural law thinking,” says Andrea Katz, a professor at Washington University School of Law. “In fact, it’s close to theology on the bench.”
Next, Thomas’ speech warns that Washington is full of people who pay “lip service” to conservative principles—“claiming a commitment to some righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety, or to the original meaning of the Constitution”—but who falter in upholding those convictions. His screed against these right-leaning Judases is long, as he slams them for fearing criticism, exalting in flattery, and ultimately choosing to conform. “They water down their message, negotiate against themselves, vote against their principles, and hide in the tall grass,” he said. “They recast themselves as institutionalists, pragmatists, or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences and their country.” Without devotion to our founding principles, which he has cast as the natural law that reigns over the Constitution, our nation is in peril.
Third, Thomas identifies what he sees as threatening the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality. The answer is progressivism. But the furor over his remarks didn’t capture the nuance of who exactly Thomas was talking about and what he was really driving at. He wasn’t merely talking about today’s progressives as the political opponents of conservatives; he was talking about a rightwing fringe theory that the early 20th century’s Progressive Era ushered in an unconstitutional change in our government that must be rooted out.
Thomas’ grudge goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when, as the nation’s economy and infrastructure became more advanced, Congress created new agencies to help manage modern American life. In 1913 and 1914, respectively, Federal Reserve Board to stabilize the banking system and the Federal Trade Commission were established to enforce anti-trust laws. During the New Deal era, Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration responded to the urgencies of the Great Depression with new agencies to modernize government and tackle the problems highlighted by the crisis, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Communications Commission. This is a partial list, but they are all independent agencies, which Congress attempted to insulate from presidential control by placing them in the hands of bipartisan boards whose members can only be fired by the president for good reason.
The conservative legal movement has long been opposed to these agencies. With the notable exception of the Federal Reserve Board, which they concede is essential to the stability of the economy, far-right judges and academics decry such agencies as an unaccountable “fourth branch” of government. More broadly, the right looks skeptically on all agencies, even those that are not technically independent from the president, as an undemocratic administrative state.
Perhaps Thomas’ mood is because he thinks other GOP-appointees are chickening out.
One radical theory, affiliated with Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger, is that the administrative state is un-American and therefore unconstitutional. According to this narrative, President Woodrow Wilson, in the thrall of German-style bureaucratic managementand opposed to democracy, fought for an administrative state to hijack the government and ignore the will of the people. “The Germanic trope is the fever dream of right wing members of the conservative legal movement who want to discredit the modern administrative state,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan, told me in 2024; by that point the theory had wound its way from conservative books, blogs, and conferences to form the basis of an appeals court opinion. The “Germanic trope” ignores the fact that independent agencies were actually created in the United States’ earliest years, establishing plenty of American antecedents for today’s agencies.
Yet in Austin, Thomas clearly embraced this theory. “Progressivism was not native to America,” he argued. “Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany.” But Thomas goes further than saying agencies are undemocratic—to him, they are contrary to God. He argues that the progressive vision of an administrative state transforms our system of government from one dedicated to unalienable rights of individuals to one where the government and its administrators are supreme: “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government… It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”
This is not normal. The idea that all people have inherent dignity is not incompatible with, say, a functioning Federal Trade Commission. Nor does the Constitution anywhere state that its prescriptions are based on theological conviction. “This critique is denying the premise of a written constitution,” says Katz. “Our rights come from our Constitution. They don’t come from God. That’s the premise of the US Constitution; we have to write down the rights that we have. That’s quite a statement from a judge whose job is to enforce the text.”
It’s impossible to know why Thomas sounded so stern this week. Perhaps this speech was something he’s been mulling for a long time. But there’s a chance that it reflects a current frustration with his colleagues. Right now the court is deliberating a case, Trump v. Slaughter, on the constitutionality of independent agencies. The court appears poised to strike down a seminal 1935 precedent that upheld the independence of these Progressive and New Deal era agencies. Why is Thomas so upset at the Progressive Era’s staying power and the conservative cowards who don’t live up to their promises if the court is about to strike a fatal blow to the administrative state?
Perhaps Thomas’ mood is linked to the possibility that he thinks his fellow GOP-appointees are chickening out. Based on the court’s recent actions and the oral arguments in Slaughter, it’s highly unlikely that Humphrey’s Executor will stand. But it is quite possible that the justices are crafting a compromise by which some agencies may remain independent. This almost certainly includes the Federal Reserve Board. And it may mean that rather than ending independence in one fell swoop, the justices will decide other agencies may qualify for independence from presidential control, possibly on a case by case basis.
Such a ruling would not be a victory for progressivism, good government, or democracy. But for Thomas, it would nonetheless be proof that his conservative colleagues had fallen short. His holy war, perhaps, is not yet won.
