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When a rocket carrying the first module of the International Space Station blasted off from Kazakhstan in November of 1998, NASA officials said that the station would serve as an orbiting home for astronauts and cosmonauts for at least 15 years. It's now been over 18 years that the station has been continuously occupied by people. The place is impressive, with more living space than a six-bedroom house, two bathrooms and a large bay window for looking down at Earth. NASA and its international partners have spent decades and more than $100 billion to make the station a reality. The...

Former vice president Joe Biden is proposing to restore California’s now-defunct high-speed rail project — just months after Gov. Gavin Newsom pulled the plug, and President Donald Trump pulled the funding. Biden formerly championed high-speed rail with President Barack Obama as part of the 2009 “stimulus” package. Joel Fox, commenting on California’s widely-read Fox & Hounds blog, noted the provision in Biden’s new plan to tackle climate change

John Diepersloot squinted under a bright Central Valley sun, pointing to the damage to his fruit orchard that came with the California bullet train. He lost 70 acres of prime land. Rail contractors left mounds of rubble along his neat rows. Irrigation hoses are askew. A sophisticated canopy system for a kiwi field, supported by massive steel cables, was torn down. But what really irritates Diepersloot is the $250,000 that he paid out of his own pocket for relocating wells, removing trees, building a road and other expenses. “I am out a quarter-million bucks on infrastructure, and they haven’t paid...

SACRAMENTO (AP) — The Trump administration cancelled nearly $1 billion in federal money for California’s high-speed rail project Thursday, further throwing into question the future of the ambitious plan to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Federal Railroad Administration’s announcement it would not give California the money came several months after sniping between President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom over the project. The administration will still try to force California to return another $2.5 billion that has already been spent. Trump had seized on Newsom’s remarks in February that the project as planned would cost too much and...

WASHINGTON - A U.S. senator plans to introduce legislation on Thursday to streamline regulation and permitting requirements for the development of mines for lithium, graphite and other electric-vehicle supply chain minerals, part of a plan to offset China’s dominance in the space. U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Republican chair of the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will introduce the Minerals Security Act alongside Senator Joe Manchin.

Lockheed Martin is unveiling new designs for a human lunar lander concept that can take people to and from the lunar surface. And the company says it can be ready within the next five years.... The vehicle consists of two elements: a lander portion that can travel down to the ground, and an ascent vehicle that can lift astronauts off the Moon’s surface. The lander is meant to travel to and from a new space station that NASA wants to build around the Moon called the Gateway. If all of these elements are created, astronauts would travel to the Gateway...

Whether it’s the Washington, D.C., streetcar, California’s bullet train, or New York’s Second Avenue subway, public-transit projects are almost always disruptive, delayed, over budget or underused—if not all of the above. Add another example to the list: a dead-end bus line in Albuquerque, N.M. Today, more than 16 months after Mayor Berry hopped on ART’s first ride, the bus lanes are empty. In 2016 the city paid $23 million for a fleet of 18 all-electric buses from the Chinese company Build Your Dreams. The system for charging the buses’ batteries proved faulty, and city inspectors found problems with the air...

Now, government officials are dialing up the pressure on Boeing to speed up development of the long-overdue rocket, called Space Launch System or SLS. The space agency contracted Boeing in 2012 to build SLS's core components. Bridenstine's remarks came after US Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday at a National Space Council meeting in Alabama that news of more hangups with the SLS program were a "great disappointment," and the current timeline is "just not good enough." Boeing began building SLS's core stage, the backbone of the rocket, about seven years ago. Officials said at the time that SLS would...

The trains will stop at three stations inside the terminal loop and three outside that includes a Metro station, stitching public transit with air travel. Officials are hoping the new transportation system will reduce congestion in and around the airport, which was recently named the fourth busiest in the world. The project will cost $5.5 billion and will be paid for with both private and public funds. It’s also expected to bring 2,000 jobs to the area. The people mover is scheduled to be completed in 2023.

When the Education Department approved a proposal by Dream Center, a Christian nonprofit with no experience in higher education, to buy a troubled chain of for-profit colleges, skeptics warned that the charity was unlikely to pull off the turnaround it promised. What they didn’t foresee was just how quickly and catastrophically it would fail. Barely a year after the takeover, dozens of Dream Center campuses are nearly out of money and may close as soon as Friday. More than a dozen others have been sold in the hope they can survive. The affected schools — Argosy University, South University and...

It’s time to go sit in the corner, Billy! Mayor de Blasio finally admitted Tuesday that his costly and controversial Renewal plan to fix nearly 100 of the city’s worst schools was a failure — pulling the plug on a years-long effort that cost taxpayers $773 million. “We did not say everything would be perfect,” the mayor said, offering a huge understatement to describe a program that saw one-quarter of its schools either closed or merged. “We said we were ready to go out there and create real investment, help kids right now, and see how many schools could really...

The $2.5 billion has already been spent — but California has failed to deliver the high-speed rail (on time, or at all) as promised. Therefore, the Trump administration argues, the state has to repay federal taxpayers. The Los Angeles Times quoted Stanford law professor David Freeman Engstrom, a Stanford law professor, describing Trump’s effort as a “nuclear option.” The practice of recovering money after a breach of contract, while common in the private sector, was virtually unheard of in government, he explained. “There is a reluctance to penalize misspending by local government agencies. … Almost never do those violations result...

President Barack Obama secured $8 billion in his 2009 economic stimulus package to start building toward the dream of true high-speed trains whisking passengers between major American cities. It was a paltry amount compared to the hundreds of billions it would actually take to fulfill that dream, but it was considered a serious down payment. At the time, Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said, “I’m not a historian, but I know this: One of the legacies for this administration, for the president and the vice president, will be high-speed rail. That will be their transportation legacy.” A decade later, little...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday he's abandoning a plan to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, a project with an estimated cost that has ballooned to $77 billion. "Let's be real," Newsom said in his first State of the State address. "The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency." The idea long championed by Newsom's predecessor, Jerry Brown, is years behind schedule. The latest estimate for completion is 2033.

Before NASA's Mars 2020 mission is ready to launch toward the Red Planet, the agency has to paint the new rover — a task more challenging than it sounds. While a paint job may sound like an insignificant task, both the formulation and the process of painting a spacecraft like this have to be precise. And each spacecraft is unique. In August 2018, engineers working on the rover's chassis (the frame of the spacecraft) started the first step in the painting process: taping. Parts of the rover must never be painted, such as places where electronics boxes will eventually go...

a report from the Auditor of the State of California on the High Speed Rail Project ... To understand just how damning the HSR audit was, just consider the subtitle: “Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays in the System’s Construction.” But like many government documents, the audit is couched in bureaucratic language that ordinary citizens may not understand. For that reason, below are the summary points as provided by the state auditor with accompanying translations. Auditor: “Although the Authority has secured and identified funding of over $28 billion that it...

The cost of constructing the Southern California section of the state bullet train could jump by as much as $11 billion over estimates released earlier this year, though rail authority officials caution that their new numbers assume a more expansive design than is likely to be built. The new estimates are contained in environmental reports prepared for Thursday’s meeting of the authority board, which will review planned routes throughout the Southland. The reports acknowledge that the new cost estimates could affect the $77-billion price tag of the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco system, though they also use a different methodology than previous...

California’s embattled high-speed rail project has been beset by “flawed decision making and poor contract management” that have led to billions of dollars in cost overruns and significant delays in construction in the San Joaquin Valley, according a report issued Thursday by state Auditor Elaine Howle. Howle’s audit, requested earlier this year by the state Legislature, is a sharp critique of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the agency tasked with planning and developing the state’s bullet-train system. Among its key findings is that the authority, in an effort to beat the clock on a federal deadline for spending stimulus grant...

Jerry Brown did not invent the idea of a high-speed rail system to connect Northern and Southern California. It was voted on by the state Legislature and ratified by voters years before he returned to the governor’s office in 2011. But for the last eight years, as cost estimates have skyrocketed and federal and private sector funding for the project has evaporated, Brown has become high-speed rail’s most persistent defender. Only weeks away from the election to replace him, neither candidate for governor appears to share the depth of Brown’s commitment to a statewide rail system. Fellow Democrat Gavin Newsom...

The California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) surprised local communities on Wednesday by proposing a controversial Burbank-to-Palmdale route featuring above-ground tracks. The Los Angeles Times reported that the proposed 38-mile track alignment will cross the San Gabriel Mountains via a series of at grade sections and five separate tunnels. The bullet train’s original route, offered in support of the SB 1856 bond measure passed by the California Legislature in 2000, proposed to follow the Interstate 5 Freeway and tunnel under the 4,144 ft-Tejon Pass to link Los Angeles and Bakersfield.