Category: True story

When a fire raged through Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019, it didn’t destroy the structure’s stained-glass windows, which were created by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859. Last month, however, French President Emmanuel Macron proposed replacing them with contemporary designs.

Spirited backlash followed, with critics arguing that the change would disrupt the “architectural unity” of the famous landmark. Now, more than 125,000 people have signed a petition against the new windows’ installation.

“What sense does it make to restore the cathedral to its last known historical state (before April 15, 2019), that of Viollet-le-Duc, only to deprive the building of an essential element that Viollet-le-Duc wanted?” the petition reads, per a translation by Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “Who gave the head of state a mandate to alter a cathedral that does not belong to him, but to everyone?”

Laurent Ulrich, the archbishop of Paris, first suggested the idea, reports the Guardian’s Kim Willsher. When announcing the plan, Macron invited contemporary French artists to submit designs for six new windows, which would ultimately be installed in the cathedral’s south aisle. The current windows would likely be housed in a new museum dedicated to the cathedral and the restoration process.

The petition, organized by the art magazine La Tribune de l’Art, appeared within days.

Just how faithful the restorations should be to historic designs has been a matter of debate ever since the fire. In the aftermath of the disaster, Macron suggested replacing Notre-Dame’s iconic spire (also designed by Viollet-le-Duc) with a modern version to symbolize the cathedral’s endurance. That idea was swiftly shut down. Workers eventually replaced the spire with a design that was identical to the original.

“Emmanuel Macron wants to put the mark of the 21st century on Notre-Dame. … A little modesty might be best,” reads the petition, per Google Translate. “We will not be cruel enough to remind you that this mark already exists: fire.”

If the French government moves forward with the plan, it won’t be the first time the cathedral’s windows have been updated. Only a small portion of the current glass dates back to the 12th century, while the majority was added much later in the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries, as Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, the rector-archbishop of Notre-Dame, tells the French newspaper La Croix, per El País’ Sara González.

Didier Rykner, the founder and editor of La Tribune de l’Art, has a suggestion of his own: He thinks that the updated stained-glass windows should be added to Notre-Dame’s north tower, which currently has regular windows rather than stained glass.

Replacing the north tower windows would “enrich the cathedral” and have “magnificent symbolic” value, writes Rykner in the magazine. “It was in the north tower, when they fought the fire that threatened to bring down the bells and, in turn, the cathedral, that the firefighters risked their lives to save the monument. Paying tribute to the firemen, bringing new stained-glass windows to Notre-Dame without vandalizing Viollet-le-Duc’s work, giving future visitors more to see—this common-sense solution could suit everyone.”

The reconstructed cathedral is scheduled to reopen on December 8, 2024.

Artists are accusing the developers of an artificial intelligence art generator of ripping off their work after a list containing the names of thousands of creatives recently began circulating online.

They claim the list confirms what they had long suspected: that Midjourney—the company behind a popular text-to-image generative A.I. technology—used their artwork without their permission to train its art generator.

The list in question contains the names of 4,700 individuals. The artist Jon Lam shared it online in late December, but it was initially included in a court exhibit in November as part of a lawsuit against Midjourney and several other generative A.I. companies.

A larger spreadsheet titled “Midjourney Style List” is also circulating online. The spreadsheet reportedly contains the names of some 16,000 “proposed additions.” (Though its owners have made it inaccessible, a version of the sheet still exists on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.)

David Holz, Midjourney’s founder, purportedly shared the list on Discord in 2022, reports NBC News’ Angela Yang.

The lists feature painters, cartoonists, filmmakers, animators, sculptors and many other types of creatives, both living and dead. They include famous figures such as Tim Burton, Pablo Picasso, Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney and Banksy.

Many lesser-known artists also made it onto the lists, including a 6-year-old, reports ARTnews’ Karen K. Ho.

Together, the lists have reinvigorated the debate around whether A.I. should be allowed to imitate the work of real-life artists—and, perhaps more importantly, make money off those imitations. Legal and ethical questions about copyright infringement and consent continue to swirl, with artists calling for greater regulation of A.I. art generators and related technologies. Some creatives are asking lawmakers—and the courts—to help settle the issue.

Tools like Midjourney use machine learning models to study vast amounts of data, including online images of artwork and stills from movies and video games. Then, when a user inputs a prompt, like “Paint the Faroe Islands in the style of Vincent van Gogh,” the A.I. uses its training to produce an image that matches the request. Artists argue that the A.I. platforms are spitting out replicas of their existing work—much of which is copyrighted—rather than using it as inspiration to create something new.

In a 2022 interview with Forbes’ Rob Salkowitz, Holz acknowledged that the company did not seek consent from living artists to use their work while training Midjourney’s generative A.I. technology. The company also did not get permission to use copyrighted work, he told the publication.

“There’s no way to find a picture on the internet and then automatically trace it to an owner and then have any way of doing anything to authenticate it,” Holz said.

When asked if artists could opt out of having their work included in the training data, Holz responded that the company was “looking at that.”

Some artists are taking matters into their own hands. For example, researchers at the University of Chicago have created programs that make images difficult for A.I. tools to scrape.

In the meantime, as the legal landscape evolves, “documents like the ‘Midjourney Style List’ [can help] shed light on the actual processes of converting copyrighted artwork into A.I. reference material,” writes the Art Newspaper’s Theo Belci.

Lily Gladstone won Best Actress at the Golden Globes last night, becoming the first Indigenous person in history to receive the award. She began her acceptance remarks by speaking in the Blackfeet language.

“Hello, all my relations,” said Gladstone, according to a translation that Karla Bird, a tribal outreach specialist at the University of Montana, provided to Today’s Anna Kaplan. “My name is Eagle Woman. I am Blackfeet. I love you.”

She gave the remainder of her speech in English. “I’m here with my mom, who, even though she’s not Blackfeet, worked tirelessly to get our language into our classrooms so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up,” she said.

Lily Gladstone Wins Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama | Golden Globes

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Gladstone, who has Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage, spent her early years on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana before moving to Seattle. She won her first Golden Globe for her role as Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon. In the film, Mollie is an Osage woman whose family is murdered after oil is discovered on Osage Nation land in Oklahoma in the 1920s.

Gladstone is only the second Indigenous actress in the Globes’ history to receive a nomination. The first, Irene Bedard, was nominated for her role in the TV movie Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee in 1995.

According to a recent report from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which took an inventory of 1,600 top films from the past 16 years, less than a quarter of 1 percent of all speaking characters were Native American—and a quarter of those parts were played by non-Native actors.

Gladstone called out Hollywood’s historical lack of Indigenous representation during her speech.

“I’m so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I’m not fluent in, up here, because in this business, Native actors used to speak their lines in English, and then the sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera,” she said.

Gladstone’s co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, attended the Globes and wore a pin with the symbol of the Osage nation. “I have my Osage pin on tonight, because, you know, the Osage nation, we’re standing in unison with them for this movie,” he told Entertainment Tonight’s Rachel Smith before the ceremony.

The award comes on the heels of two Best Actress wins for Gladstone at the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. With the Oscars coming up in March, Gladstone’s latest prize continues the award show momentum that she has been generating all season.

“She had a very sharp sense of her own presence before the camera and an extremely unusual trust in simplicity,” Martin Scorsese, the film’s director, told Vulture’s Alison Willmore last month. “That’s a rare thing. You can’t take your eyes off her.”

Gladstone ended her speech by championing the importance of Indigenous representation on the big screen.

“This is for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream,” she said, “who is seeing themselves represented and our stories told—by ourselves, in our own words—with tremendous allies and tremendous trust from and with each other.”

As someone who grew up in the Philippines, I have always loved hot, spicy foods. A typical Filipino meal includes some mix of soy sauce, fish sauce, vinegar, citrus, and peppers, which can be used to customize the flavor of a dish. I always make sure to pile on lots of red and green peppers or to add a dash of Tabasco. At one point, I even planted some chili plants in my family’s backyard and tried making hot sauce with my cousin Franz. [1]

When I stayed for an extended period in Mexico in 2021, one of the biggest pleasures was the food’s spiciness—from the salsa verde (a green sauce usually spiced by jalapeño peppers) to the aguachile (a ceviche-like dish typical of Mexico’s Pacific coast, made of shrimp marinated in lime and chili peppers, among other ingredients). Beyond the kinds of peppers that one can buy in local grocery stores in many places in the world—such as habañeros, jalapeños, and chile de arbol—there was a bewildering assortment of peppers with distinct shapes, sizes, and levels of spiciness. These ranged from the peppercorn-like chiltepin to the bell-like cascabel, all readily available in the nearest supermercado.

In fact, all of the world’s chili peppers—including the labuyo peppers that we typically use in the Philippines—likely came from the first domesticated chili plants (Capsicum annuum) in what is now Mexico. They were imported as part of the Columbian exchange, which saw the two-way transfer of ideas, animals, plants, diseases, and people between the Eastern Hemisphere and the Americas following Christopher Colombus’ first transatlantic voyage in the late 15th century.

Unthinkable as it may sound today, the cuisines we have come to associate with spiciness—Indian, Thai, Korean, and Chinese, among others—had no chili peppers at all before their introduction in the 16th century onward. Prior to that, those cuisines relied on other spices or aromatics to add heat to dishes, such as ginger, likely native to southern China, or black pepper, native to India.

How did chili peppers become part of the human diet beginning in the Americas an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 years ago? And why were they eventually embraced by the rest of the world?

These questions fascinate me not just because of my personal love for hot sauce, but because, as an anthropologist, I am deeply interested in how culture shapes our human senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

While our bodily senses are mediated by various receptors, how we interpret sensory stimuli depends on our previous experiences and our personal preferences, both of which are in turn influenced by the environments we grow up in. To give just one example, anthropologists have investigated how even color (that is, how we would “see” or visually perceive a particular object) is not universal but differs across societies.

Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that the human propensity for spiciness is borne of necessity. They posit that because peppers (and other spicy foods, including wasabi) have natural antimicrobial properties that can help preserve perishable foods, humans developed a taste for them, particularly in tropical climates where food spoils easily. (In the evolution of the chili plant itself, the emergence of capsaicin, which creates the burning sensation in chiles, appears to be linked with its ability to ward off fungi.)

Psychology researchers, on the other hand, have posited that some people’s preference for capsaicin-containing foods is related to thrill-seeking tendencies. Psychologists Paul Rozin and Deborah Schiller concluded this back in 1980, drawing on an experiment that involved giving people increasingly spicy doses of chili. “Eating of chili, riding on roller coasters, taking very hot baths, and many other human activities can be considered instances of thrill seeking or enjoyment of ‘constrained risks,’” they wrote. More recent studies have associated the preference for chiles with personality traits like “sensation seeking” and “sensitivity to reward.” The recent popularity of chili eating competitions can be seen as an extreme example of these tendencies.

Beyond these biological and psychological investigations, anthropologists and those in related fields have also contributed to our understanding of why particular groups tend to prefer spicier foods by bringing in the element of culture. As anthropologists have documented over the years, humans can eat a diverse range of foods—so our decisions about what to eat often speak to much more than our biological or psychological needs. They reflect our societies and their values.

In some parts of Mexico, for instance, the preference for hotter foods is tied to notions of national and regional identities. The cultural historian Esther Katz cites an expression shared by Indigenous Mixtec people from Oaxaca: “Somos fuertes porque comemos puro chile” (“We are strong, since we eat nothing but pepper”). The association between eating spicy foods and certain personality traits, such as courage or spunk, can be a way for some people to distinguish themselves from other groups, even those living within the same country.

Further illustrating this point, chili peppers figure in regional identities in Communist China, and even regional rivalries. A common saying goes: “The Sichuanese are not afraid of hot chiles; no degree of heat will frighten off the people of Guizhou; but those Hunanese are terrified of food that isn’t hot!” The leader of the Communist revolution, Mao Zedong, was a native of Hunan who pointedly connected the revolutionary spirit with the ability to handle spice.

Mao is said to have remarked: “Without chili peppers there would be no revolution.”

Spiciness is also connected in some places with gender identities. For instance, in Japan, as anthropologist Jon Holtzman has investigated, men were traditionally expected to prefer spicy foods (and alcohol) and to disdain sweet foods. Attitudes toward food preferences have changed alongside shifts in Japanese societal notions of masculinity in the 20th century—though sweetness is still sometimes associated more with women and children.

Of course, it goes without saying that tastes change along with societies. Indeed, certain food products that may seem unpalatable or even disgusting to some can become well-loved by others. Take, for instance, the food spread Vegemite becoming part of Australian national identity, or guinea pigs, traditionally eaten by Indigenous communities in the Andes, becoming part of Peruvian fine dining in recent years.

And even within a particular group, individuals have their own preferences. Associating certain ethnicities with food preferences can lead to inaccurate generalizations and damaging stereotypes. An eighth grader named Jacquelin Rojas from the U.S. summarized this point succinctly on a website inviting people to distill their thoughts about race. “Not all Mexicans like spicy foods,” she wrote.

In the end, there is no single explanation that can account for why some people desire spicy foods while others don’t. Regardless, the travels of chili peppers across continents and over the centuries shows just how far some humans—myself included—will go to spice up our diets and everyday lives.

This story was originally published on Sapiens, an anthropology magazine.

Gideon Lasco is an anthropologist and a physician based in Manila, the Philippines. He obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam and his MD from the University of the Philippines, where he currently teaches anthropology. His research includes the chemical practices of young people, the meanings of human height, the politics of health care, and the lived realities of the Philippine “drug war.” Lasco has a weekly column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where he writes about health, culture, and society. Follow him on Twitter @gideonlasco.

During the Viking Age, from 750 to 1050 C.E., Scandinavians were on the move. The seafaring Vikings were the first people to reach four different continents, visiting Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. As they did, they exchanged goods, technology and culture—as well as genes.

In a study published last week in the journal Cell, scientists examined nearly 300 ancient human genomes from Scandinavia that span a 2,000-year period, painting a picture of the region’s genetic history.

They looked at 48 new and 249 previously published ancient genomes and compared them to 16,638 genomes from modern humans. New evidence from several archaeological sites, including the wreck of the Swedish warship Kronan, helped reveal how the prevalence of genes from three regions—the British and Irish Isles, the eastern Baltic and Southern Europe—varied across time and space.

“I do not think there is any other study digging this deep into Scandinavia,” Anders Götherström, a study co-author and molecular archaeologist at Stockholm University’s Center for Paleogenetics, tells Gizmodo’s Isaac Schultz.

British and Irish ancestry was present across Scandinavia at the time, while eastern Baltic ancestry was contained in central Sweden and Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Southern European ancestry appeared in remains from southern Scandinavia.

The study “confirms that the Viking Age—besides representing the past expansion of Scandinavians to other regions within Europe—also enabled the first arrival of diverse foreign genomic ancestries into the Scandinavian Peninsula,” Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos, an archaeologist at Florida Atlantic University who did not contribute to the study, tells Gizmodo in an email.

Migrations varied by region: People who came to Scandinavia from the British and Irish Isles might have been high-ranking Christian missionaries or monks, or they might have been enslaved people Vikings transported against their will.

From some regions, the influx appeared to be sex-based and mainly made up of women. Female arrivals from the east Baltic and, to a lesser degree, the British and Irish Isles drove the impact of these areas on the genetic makeup of Viking-age Scandinavia.

“We have no way to know with our data the number of women involved or if these women with east Baltic and British-Irish ancestries were in Scandinavia voluntarily or involuntarily,” Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela, the study’s first author and a molecular archaeologist also with the Center for Paleogenetics, tells Reuters’ Will Dunham.

The researchers also found that some of the ancestries that appeared during the Viking Age are less prevalent than they are today, writes Popular Science’s Laura Baisas.

“Although still evident in modern Scandinavians, levels of non-local ancestry in some regions are lower than those observed in ancient individuals from the Viking to Medieval periods,” Rodríguez-Varela says in a statement. “This suggests that ancient individuals with non-Scandinavian ancestry contributed proportionately less to the current gene pool in Scandinavia than expected based on the patterns observed in the archaeological record.”

The researchers aren’t sure why this is the case, but they say future studies with more genomes could shed light on the question, per Gizmodo.

If a moose sheds its antlers in a forest and no one is around to hear it, do they make a sound? While that may be up for debate, a wildlife enthusiast in eastern Canada was around to capture a drone video of the moment a bull moose shed its antlers, providing a rare glimpse into the common winter event.

Earlier this month, Derek Burgoyne was surveying a patch of hardwood trees while working his job as a woods operations supervisor, reports CBC News. As he maneuvered a drone through the forest in New Brunswick, Canada, he stumbled upon three moose in the snowy terrain.

Burgoyne followed one moose that was still equipped with both its antlers and started recording. The animal then shook its body to get rid of snow on its fur, causing its antlers—which measure 45 inches across—to fall to the ground.

“Never in my wildest dreams would [I] ever imagine catching this on film,” Burgoyne tells CBC News. “This is winning the lottery when it comes to wildlife photography for sure.”

Drone video shows rare moment of moose shedding both antlers

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During the winter season, moose shed their antlers before regrowing them in the spring. The shedding process, also known as casting, is a normal event that occurs annually for many male cervids—a group of hoofed mammals like moose, deer and elk. Caribou are the only cervids to have females grow and shed antlers as well.

Though it’s not unusual to find discarded antlers after a moose sheds them, footage of the actual process is rare. In another miraculous event captured on video, a moose in Alaska went viral last month after its antler shedding was recorded on a doorbell camera.

For moose, antlers are primarily tools in sexual reproduction. During the fall mating season, female moose may prefer to breed with males that have larger antlers, perceiving them to be more physically fit, Lee Kantar, a moose biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fish and Wildlife, tells National Geographic’s Jason Bittel.

“A bull [moose] grows his first set beginning with his first birthday, in general, and they grow in size and shape each year until around 11, when growth is minimal,” Kantar tells the publication.

As winter approaches and the breeding season ends, the antlers become a hassle more than anything. By dropping this unwieldy headgear in the colder months, male moose become more mobile and can better find enough food to survive, writes Melissa Clark for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Moose are the largest species of deer, and males can weigh up to 1,800 pounds and reach over six feet tall. Landon Magee, a wildlife biologist at the University of Montana and a member of the Blackfeet Nation, tells National Geographic that the animals can be “very, very aggressive,” particularly if a female moose is with its calves.

It’s no wonder, then, that Burgoyne waited for the moose to lumber away before walking into the open patch where it had shed its antlers to hold and observe them. Burgoyne is a “shed hunter” who surveys the woods and collects fallen antlers, he tells the Guardian’s Leyland Cecco. Though some shed hunters search for antlers to sell, earning profits that can amount to thousands of dollars, Burgoyne tells the publication he simply enjoys the peace of being in nature as he locates the animals’ impressive headgear.

His recent find is the first time he’s ever collected a pair of matching antlers, which he can now add to his antler collection that is outgrowing the space available in his house.

“I enjoy being in the woods,” Burgoyne tells the Guardian. “It’s great exercise, and it’s fun tracking the moose through the winter and looking for their sheds in the spring. Each one you find feels like the first one. It never gets old.”

Mysterious messages found in the pocket of an antique dress have finally been decoded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Ten years ago, archaeologist and antique dress collector Sara Rivers Cofield found two crumpled pieces of paper tucked into a hidden pocket of a dress dating to the mid-1880s. Scrawled on the pages were nonsensical strings of text: One line, for example, read “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank,” while another read “Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan.”

Rivers Cofield posted about the dress and its surprising contents on her blog in February 2014. The unintelligible words gained notoriety and soon became considered among the 50 most “unsolvable” codes in the world, per NOAA.

But last year, that changed. Wayne Chan, a research computer analyst at the University of Manitoba in Canada, determined the code words would have been used to transmit local weather via telegraph.

In those days, telegraph messages containing lots of information had to be condensed in order to save money. Chan explained in a 2023 paper in the journal Cryptologia that telegraph companies charged by the word—so encoding messages could effectively cut down their price.

The line beginning with Bismark, for example, seems to encode the weather in present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, on May 27, 1888, at 10 p.m. The short list of five words has wide-reaching weather data—air temperature, barometric pressure, dew point, precipitation, wind direction, cloud conditions, wind velocity and sunset observations—all baked into it.

“For the first time, the telegraph allowed news about the weather to travel faster than the weather itself,” Chan tells Cameron MacIntosh of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC News).

When Rivers Cofield first found the bronze-colored dress, she wasn’t aware of the notes tucked away inside of it, or even its hidden pocket. She purchased it at an antique mall in Maine in 2013. In her blog post, Rivers Cofield calls it “a textbook mid-1880s silk bustle dress” (a bustle is a padding or structure that pushes out the skirt at the dress’ rear).

The garment’s silk was in good condition, and it still had the original buttons, Rivers Cofield wrote on her blog. The buttons appeared to have images of Ophelia from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

A closer examination of the dress revealed a paper tag sewn into the bodice with the name “Bennett” handwritten in cursive. It wasn’t until Rivers Cofield turned the dress inside out that she discovered a pocket that had been hidden by the overskirt.

“It wouldn’t have been possible to get at the pocket at all without causing a rip if someone had the dress on,” Rivers Cofield wrote on her blog.

“It’s a bit of a private spot—it almost seems like it was protected,” she tells CBC News.

Her post went viral, and people began concocting theories about the meaning of the notes, with some speculating they could be tied to the Civil War. The age of the dress, however, made that unlikely. A more plausible explanation was that the text was meant to be sent by telegraph.

Chan became interested in tracking down the telegraphic code used in the notes, so he searched through 170 different codebooks—without success. Eventually, he found a book with a section on the U.S. Army Signal Corps’ weather code, and with it, he felt he was onto something.

Certain aspects of the notes, such as the length of the lines (around five to seven words) and the fact that they started with the name of a place, were reminiscent of the weather codes Chan had come across, according to CBC News. He contacted a NOAA librarian who led him to an 1892 telegraphic code book for weather, which helped Chan confirm the notes did in fact contain meteorological reports.

With the code book and other resources, Chan determined the messages were from Army Signal Service weather stations in the U.S. and Canada, per NOAA.

The line “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank” meant that in Bismarck, the temperature was 56 degrees Fahrenheit and the barometric pressure was 30.08 Hg—information encoded in the word “omit.” The word “leafage” conveyed the dew point was 32 degrees at 10 p.m. Skies were clear with no precipitation and wind from the north (“buck”), blowing at 12 miles per hour (“bank”).

Chan and Rivers Cofield are still unsure about who owned the dress and how they ended up with the weather report. Several women worked as clerical staff for the Army Signal Service in Washington, D.C. in the 1880s, per NOAA. But Chan couldn’t find records of anyone named “Bennett” working there at the time, leaving that bit of the mystery still unsolved.

At the new Moonshot Museum in Pittsburgh, visitors can tour a lunar habitat, design a mission patch, and even build their own model rovers. But the star attraction—behind floor-to-ceiling windows—is a clean room where technicians can be seen working on landers and rovers that, if all goes according to plan, will be the first U.S. missions to touch the surface of the moon since 1972.

This glimpse into the future is made possible by Astrobotic Technology, which houses the museum in the front of its sprawling 47,000-square-foot headquarters. Astrobotic is one of several private companies that has been awarded a contract by NASA to develop reliable lunar delivery systems under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. This new generation of landers would deliver cargo for scientific research, commercial development, and exploration—all part of NASA’s long-term plans for Apollo’s successor program Artemis, which envisions an ongoing human presence on the lunar surface. Astrobotic’s initial project, the six-by-eight-foot Peregrine Lunar Lander, will deliver nearly two dozen payloads from six nations.

“We are engineers building science fiction,” says Andrew Jones, Astrobotic’s director of landers and spacecraft.

For the moment, though, Jones and his colleagues are focused on the more immediate task of getting Peregrine safely to the lunar surface. The mission—previously scheduled for summer 2023—had to be delayed due to problems that emerged during tests of the launch vehicle, which is being developed by another company. “It’s really challenging to land these things on the moon,” says Matthew Shindell, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum who recently acquired a test model of Peregrine for the Futures in Space gallery. “If you look at the track record, you see far more failures than successes, as far as the times we missed the moon versus the times we crashed.”

Indeed, while China has had ongoing success with its Chang’e series of uncrewed lunar spacecraft and India’s Vikram lander recently touched down on the moon, other countries have seen their ambitions smashed to pieces on the lunar surface. In 2019, prior to its recent success, India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission, carrying another Vikram lander, crashed when its breaking rockets failed. Likewise, that same year, Israel’s robotic Bersheet spacecraft, built by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, experienced a “hard landing” after communications dropped out 489 feet above the lunar surface. Last April, Japan’s Hakuto-R Mission 1, carrying a lander built by Tokyo-based private company iSpace, crashed into the moon’s northern hemisphere after completing a five-month journey. And Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon this past summer after it spun into an uncontrolled orbit.

NASA is aware of these risks but is betting that the faster, cheaper approach of the private sector will ultimately deliver more rewards than failures.

“It’s a very exciting time in history,” says Stephen Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, which is also developing lander technology for NASA. “If you’re an aerospace engineer, the time to be alive was during Apollo. Well, today, we’re doing it and we’re not necessarily just doing it by the government.”

Keep On Truckin’

Under its Artemis program, NASA plans to land four astronauts on the moon in 2025. But that’s just part of a larger, more ambitious vision. Artemis also intends to establish a base camp that—in tandem with an orbiting station called Gateway—will act as a hub for lunar exploration and scientific research. The base camp will eventually serve as a platform for sending astronauts on to Mars.

Maintaining a sustainable presence on the moon will require some degree of living off the land—what NASA describes as “in-situ resource utilization.” Key to that endeavor will be prospecting for ice particles in the lunar regolith that could one day be mined and turned into water and oxygen for life support, as well as hydrogen for the local production of fuel.

Meanwhile, NASA must be mindful of a critical terrestrial resource that is often in short supply: money. America’s first foray to the moon was federally funded and cost around $25.8 billion. But as Smithsonian’s Shindell observes, Americans’ priorities shifted after the initial thrill of the moon landings. “Apollo was a wonderful program and it achieved things people thought were impossible, but it was a very expensive program that probably would not have happened if it weren’t for the Cold War space race,” he says.

That’s not to say NASA isn’t getting any assistance from taxpayers. Congress allocated $7.5 billion to Artemis in 2023. But the program’s ambitious long-term plans, which include field tests of technology for in-situ resource utilization, will require multiple deliveries of supplies and equipment that could be very costly.

This quandary is what inspired a group of administrators at NASA to tap into the commercial sector by forming CLPS. Private-public partnerships have been successful in sending cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. Why not turn to the private sector to develop reliable, cost-efficient delivery services to the moon? Through 2028, CLPS has a budget of $2.6 billion, which NASA uses to bankroll lunar projects.

“We leverage the competitive nature among these companies,” says Ryan Stephan, deputy project manager for CLPS. “We think we get much more affordable pricing with competitive models. Typically, NASA would do a single mission for $300 million. NASA would have a difficult time doing that on its own.”

The anticipated reduction in cost reflects, in part, a new approach that would forego the traditional route of building custom-made spacecraft to deploy scientific equipment in favor of a more generalized approach that would utilize landers capable of ferrying several experiments to the moon with a single launch. “If you think about the variety of things that might be in the back of a FedEx truck, that’s kind of how to think about the lander,” says Jones.

Peregrine Mission One, CLPS’ first delivery truck, will carry 21 payloads. Five of those payloads will be NASA science experiments, including the linear energy transfer spectrometer—which will gather data on radiation that could pose risks to astronauts while exploring the lunar surface—and a laser retroreflector that will serve as a permanent location marker to enable precise landings.

Peregrine’s other payloads come from the private sector. Students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have built a 5.5-pound rover named Iris that will detach itself from the underside of one of Peregrine’s payload decks. Other payloads seem strictly for fun and marketing purposes. For instance, a Japanese sports-drink company, Pocari Sweat, is sending a can-shaped capsule that contains messages from children from around the world.

“It’s about engaging with our fans and making the moon accessible to the world,” says Jones. “It connects people here on Earth to the moon in a meaningful way.”

NASA intends to launch eight CLPS missions between now and 2026. The next Astrobotic lander on deck is the much larger Griffin, which has a payload capacity of 1,100 pounds. After launching aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, Griffin will deliver a 992-pound rover named VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) to the lunar south pole, where it will spend 100 days prospecting for water ice and other potentially useful resources.

Following Griffin, the lunar south pole will receive another visitor: the Nova-C lander manufactured by a Houston-based company, Intuitive Machines. Nova-C’s distinctive design—a six-legged, hexagonal cylinder—is based on a concept originally conceived by NASA under Project Morpheus, which sought to develop a lander capable of vertical takeoff and landing while using propellants that could be manufactured from lunar resources. “It’s like a Ferrari—all handmade,” boasts Altemus about Nova-C.

Nova-C will carry experiments designed to aid future exploration efforts, including technology for navigation beacons that could one day facilitate lunar landings and lunar orbit insertions. But CLPS has also caught the attention of scientists who see the program’s potential for basic research. “Following demonstrated success in reaching the lunar surface, NASA should develop a plan to maximize science return from CLPS by, for example, allowing investigators to propose instrument suites coupled to specific landing sites,” planetary scientists advised in a 2022 report.

In early 2023, NASA did just that when it announced that it had chosen a new landing site for Peregrine Mission One. Initially, Peregrine was going to land on Lacus Mortis, a plain of basaltic lava flows on the northeastern side of the near side of the moon. The updated mission will land near the Gruithuisen Domes, a geographical enigma on the northeastern border of Oceanus Procellarum. Lunar scientists suspect the Domes formed from a sticky magma rich in silica, similar in composition to granite. Yet, on Earth, formations such as these need significant water content and plate tectonics to form. Since these key ingredients don’t exist on the moon, lunar scientists have been puzzling over how these domes formed and evolved over time.

In 2026, NASA hopes to launch a CLPS mission carrying the Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer (Lunar-VISE), a suite of instruments that will investigate the origin and composition of the Gruithuisen Domes. Meanwhile, according to NASA: “The relocation of Astrobotic’s Peregrine CLPS flight to a mare near the Domes will present complementary and meaningful data to Lunar-VISE without introducing additional risk to the lander.”

“Shots On Goal”

Peregrine can deliver payloads to the moon at a cost of $1.2 million per kilogram. While that might seem staggering, it’s relatively cheap by space agency standards.

The design of the lander’s thrusters has played a role in keeping costs down. Astrobotic partnered with Frontier Aerospace Corporation to further develop a propulsion system—the Deep Space Engine —that Frontier had initially designed with NASA. Each engine can produce 100 pounds of force, and Peregrine would use five of them to make alterations in flight path or altitude to enter the moon’s orbit and descend to the surface.

What makes these thrusters distinctive is their propellant mixture, MON-25/MMH—so named  because it contains 25 percent of nitric oxide. It has a lower freezing point than other propellants, which saves on the power that would be required  for propellant heaters. That, in turn, enables engineers to cut down on the overall mass of the spacecraft, making possible lighter and more flexible designs.

While rocket and lander designs benefit from technologies that hadn’t even been invented during the Apollo era, the task of sending payloads to the moon and having them arrive intact remains a considerable challenge for uncrewed spacecraft—as Russia, Japan, and Israel recently rediscovered. While the moon’s gravity is less than Earth’s, spacecraft are still pulled toward the surface. Perfect timing is required when reducing orbital velocity and altitude to achieve a soft landing.

Can the new landers pull it off? The NASA administrators who spearheaded CLPS were candid about the risks, saying the program would be like taking “shots on goal.” A 50-50 success rate for early missions, they said, would be acceptable.

One of those administrators, Thomas Zurbuchen, then-head of NASA’s science missions, recently left the space agency. Four years after starting CLPS, he acknowledged that the program’s future would depend, in part, on the tolerance for risk. “After how many CLPS failures do we say, ‘Hey, it’s not working?’ ” he said in an interview published last year in the New York Times. “It’s an experiment, right? There is no way to get to the moon otherwise for substantially less than a billion bucks. And that’s what we tried to break, that cost of entry.”

The commercial space sector embodies a culture that moves fast and learns from its mistakes. Anyone who saw video of the spectacular explosion of Space X’s Starship in April understands that this venture has risks. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk can afford it. But the American public might be less understanding when it’s their tax dollars funding those initial failures.

For now, though, the companies NASA has rallied to return to the moon are permitting themselves to ponder the tremendous potential rewards. “We’re trying to ultimately create a sustainable lifestyle on the moon,” says Jones. “If we can succeed at that, then we can become a true multi-planet species.”

Kellie B. Gormly resides in Pittsburgh and is a regular contributor to such publications as Smithsonian, the Washington Post, History.com, and Woman’s World.

This article is from the Fall issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum’s signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

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For years, tourists and photographers have flocked to the S.S. Point Reyes, a dilapidated fishing vessel stuck in the sand at Point Reyes National Seashore in the California Bay Area.

But the iconic, Instagram-famous boat’s days may be numbered. It suffered damage during the winter storms that pummeled the state’s coastline in late December and early January—and now, national seashore staffers want to get rid of it.

“The National Park Service is aware that additional damage occurred to the vessel as a result of the most recent storms and tides,” according to a statement shared with SFGate’s Eric Brooks. “While we recognize that this is a local landmark and destination, the NPS is evaluating options to remove it safely.”

The timeline for removing the boat is “uncertain at this time,” adds a park official.

Though the vessel is often referred to as the “Point Reyes shipwreck” or the “Tomales Bay shipwreck,” it’s not really a shipwreck—though dozens of vessels did wreck in the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Built in the 1940s, the S.S. Point Reyes first served as a launch vessel during World War II. Later, it became a salmon fishing boat and eventually got stuck in the mud in the late 1990s. Today, it’s beached near the town of Inverness in Tomales Bay, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean. The vessel is roughly an hour’s drive north of downtown San Francisco.

Over time, the decaying vessel became a popular tourist destination, particularly among photographers. Visitors have also contributed to its deterioration, including a possible photoshoot gone wrong that accidentally set the boat on fire in 2016.

At some point in the relatively recent past, the vessel appears to have lost most of its hull. A photo shared on social media also shows that much of the boat is now submerged underwater. Even in its current state, tourists continue to visit the vessel—which worries local first responders, reports the San Francisco Chronicle’s Michael Cabanatuan.

“It’s completely falling apart,” Jim Fox, chief of the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department, tells the publication. “It’s much more dangerous than it used to be. As the fire chief, I would just as soon people not come out because someone’s going to get hurt.”

Storm systems that developed over the Pacific Ocean began causing coastal flooding and massive waves along the California coast in late December. Several people were injured and at least one person died as a result of the storms in Southern California, reports the Los Angeles Times’ Nathan Solis. The bad weather is also affecting local wildlife, including newborn elephant seal pups.

The Peregrine spacecraft, which is carrying NASA scientific instruments, suffered a “critical” fuel loss en route to the moon after its launch on Monday. Now, engineers are trying to extract any science they can from this mission, but they have abandoned hopes of a lunar landing.

“Given the propellant leak, there is, unfortunately, no chance of a soft landing on the moon,” Astrobotic, the aerospace firm that spearheaded Peregrine’s development, said in a statement Tuesday afternoon. “The team has updated its estimates, and we currently expect to run out of propellant in about 40 hours from now.”

The lander launched on January 8 at 2:18 a.m. Eastern time and successfully separated from the Vulcan Centaur rocket that carried it, developed by United Launch Alliance. Almost immediately, however, Peregrine ran into problems.

Soon after separation, engineers struggled to orient the lander’s solar panels toward the sun, which they realized was related to a propellant leak, reports BBC News’ Jonathan Amos. The Peregrine lander sent an image back to Earth, showing damage to the exterior of the spacecraft—a “visual clue” to the problems with its propulsion, Astrobotic said.

Through improvised actions, mission engineers managed to tilt the lander’s solar panels toward the sun, charging its battery fully. But with propellant still leaking from the craft, it is due to run out of fuel in less than two days, making a landing impossible.

“Given the situation, we have prioritized maximizing the science and data we can capture,” Astrobotic said in a statement Monday.

(1/4) We’ve received the first image from Peregrine in space! The camera utilized is mounted atop a payload deck and shows Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) in the foreground. pic.twitter.com/dUuu0Idz8K

— Astrobotic (@astrobotic) January 8, 2024

Peregrine Mission One would have been the first American-controlled moon landing since December 1972. The scientific instruments launched on this mission by NASA were meant to help the agency prepare for sending humans to the lunar surface in its Artemis program (which, the agency announced Tuesday, will be delayed.)

Peregrine’s failure “raises questions about NASA’s strategy of relying on private companies” to transport payloads to the moon, writes the New York Times’ Kenneth Chang. But NASA hopes that partnering with commercial ventures will allow for lower costs and more innovation—and the agency has said it’s prepared for some of these missions to go wrong.

“What we have learned from our commercial partners is if we have a high enough cadence, we can relax some of the requirements that make it so costly and have a higher risk appetite,” NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy told BBC News in December. “And if they fail, the next one is going to learn and succeed.”

Irrespective of the lunar lander’s fate, the Vulcan rocket’s liftoff was the first successful mission launch under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, which is meant to help the agency send science instruments to the moon.

For this mission, NASA paid $108 million to Astrobotic to have five scientific instruments and a navigation sensor delivered to the moon, reports William Harwood for CBS News. But NASA was not the company’s only customer—Peregrine Mission One is additionally carrying 20 payloads from seven nations and 16 various commercial companies.

Before launch, some of these payloads drew controversy. Two companies that specialize in memorial spaceflights for loved ones—Celestis and Elysium Space—launched human remains, including those of science-fiction creators Gene Roddenberry and Arthur C. Clarke. Navajo Nation president Buu Nygren called for the flight to be delayed due to the human remains on board, which he said was “tantamount to desecration” of the moon.

Now, the Peregrine lander will continue to use propellant until it runs out, at which point it will begin to tumble through space. Its solar panels will not be able to face the sun, so it will run out of power.

Despite the failure to complete the moon landing, NASA has expressed support for Astrobotic and maintained an optimistic outlook for future missions.

“Each success and setback are opportunities to learn and grow,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA headquarters, said in a statement. “We will use this lesson to propel our efforts to advance science, exploration and commercial development of the moon.”

Astrobotic will use lessons from Peregrine to inform its next lunar venture, Griffin Mission One, slated for late 2024. The mission will assist NASA in searching for water ice near the lunar south pole.