Month: February 2020

Enlarge / NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine discusses the FY 2021 budget proposal during a State of NASA address, Monday, Feb. 10, 2020, at Aerojet Rocketdyne's facility at Stennis Space Center. (credit: NASA)

Nearly 10 months after Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, the space agency has estimated how much its Artemis Program will cost. NASA says it will need an additional $35 billion over the next four years—on top of its existing budget—to develop a Human Landing System to get down to the Moon's surface from lunar orbit while also accelerating other programs to make the 2024 date.

NASA's human spaceflight chief, Doug Loverro, shared this number Monday at Johnson Space Center, as the Trump White House released its fiscal year 2021 budget. It calls for a big increase in NASA's budget, 12 percent over last year's budget request, with a top-line number of $25.2 billion.

The biggest increase will go toward the Human Landing System, $3.37 billion in fiscal year 2021 alone. NASA says, if funded by Congress, this would mark the first time the United States has directly spent money on a lunar lander since the Apollo program in the 1960s. The human spaceflight budget also funds a small space station in orbit around the Moon, called the Lunar Gateway.

Enlarge / Zzz... (credit: Sarah / Flickr)

The terms "night owl" and "early bird" have floated around in conversation for ages before scientists developed the jargon "chronotype" to describe a set of somewhat stable behavioral differences among people. Some individuals really are morning people, going to bed earlier and having their peak performance in the morning. Late-night sorts also exist, and there's a spectrum of people somewhere in between. Leading a lifestyle that doesn't match your chronotype leads to what's called a social jet lag, which has been linked to everything from school performance to frequency of car crashes.

But the "somewhat" portion of the "somewhat stable" description of chronotype is very real. People's chronotypes change as they age, and there's some indication that it can adapt to everything from light exposures to lifestyle.

All of that seemingly comes together at a rather important point in people's lives. School tends to start early, which studies have indicated works out well for the grades of morning people. And exacerbating this is the fact that adolescents normally see their chronotype shift ever later, typically reaching a lifetime peak in the late teens. Now, a group of Argentinian scientists has tracked what happens to students performance when there's different mismatches between chronotype and school start times.