Month: February 2023

Enlarge / Personal tents for staff at the Shackleton Glacier science camp, situated on the Shackleton Glacier in the Transantarctic mountains of Antarctica. (credit: Jeff Miller via Getty Images)

In September 2022, two months before Ph.D. student Megan Kerr was scheduled to board a military plane bound for the Antarctic ice sheet, she found herself in a conference room on Oregon State University’s campus, waiting to ask a question that had been nagging her for weeks. She sat intently through a presentation from the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. Then, she raised her hand. The room full of graduate students turned in their chairs.

“This NSF report about all the sexual harassment that’s going on in the field,” she said. “What is the NSF going to be doing in the short term, also long term, about that?” Because “a lot of us are going into the field in like, two months.”

These students and about a hundred other researchers from roughly a dozen institutions had gathered at Oregon State University to kick off COLDEX, a 5-year, $25 million-dollar paleoclimatology project tasked by the NSF, the federal science agency, to find and drill a core of Earth’s oldest ice in Antarctica.

Enlarge / US Vice President Kamala Harris shakes hands with Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, right, during a tour of Artemis II and Artemis III mission hardware at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2022. (credit: Alex Perez/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Nearly six years ago the European Space Agency surprised its longtime spaceflight partners at NASA, as well as diplomatic officials at the White House, with an announcement that some of its astronauts were training alongside Chinese astronauts. The goal was to send European astronauts to China's Tiangong space station by 2022.

"We were welcomed as colleagues and friends by the ‘taikonauts’ and the instructors," said European astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti at the time. "Language and cultural differences are obviously a challenge, but also adds value, as we are all focused on the common goal of space exploration."

European astronauts did not fly to the Chinese space station in 2022, however, even though China completed its construction before the end of the year. In fact, Europeans are now unlikely ever to do so, even as the Tiangong facility flies for another decade, or longer, in low-Earth orbit.