Month: May 2020

Enlarge / The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft arrives at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: NASA)

When NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken blast off inside a Crew Dragon spacecraft later this month, they will not only launch into space. They will also inaugurate a potentially transformative era for the space agency.

No private company has ever launched humans into orbit before. Therefore the success of their mission, and others to come in the near future, may go a long way toward determining whether the promise of commercial spaceflight and lower cost access to space becomes the new reality.

This moment has been a long time coming. Nearly 15 years ago, NASA placed a small bet on the nascent commercial space industry when it sought to diversify its fleet for delivering cargo to the International Space Station. NASA had the space shuttle to ferry supplies, of course, but that aging vehicle was not going to fly forever. So the agency’s administrator at the time, Mike Griffin, committed $500 million in seed money for the development of new, privately built spacecraft.

Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee in 2018. (credit: Xinhua/Liu Jie via Getty Images)

Google says that it will not "build custom AI/ML algorithms to facilitate upstream extraction in the oil and gas industry," the company announced on Tuesday. This represents a small but significant win for climate activists.

Google's comment coincided with the release of a new Greenpeace report highlighting the role of the three leading cloud-computing services—Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure—in helping companies find and extract oil and gas. Greenpeace notes that extracting known fossil fuel reserves would already be sufficient to push the world over 2 degrees of warming. Uncovering additional reserves will ultimately lead to even more warming.

Climate activists argue that these contracts run counter to the tech giants' broader efforts to fight climate change. All three companies have pledged to make their data centers carbon neutral in the coming decade. Amazon is seeking to bring the entire company's net carbon emissions down to zero by 2040. Jeff Bezos even pledged $10 billion of his own money to fund efforts to combat climate change.