NASA’s Artemis 1 mission is poised to take a key step toward returning humans to the Moon after a half-century hiatus. The mission, scheduled to launch on Monday, Aug. 29, 2022, is a shakedown cruise – sans crew – for NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion Crew Capsule.

The spacecraft is scheduled to travel to the Moon, deploy some small satellites and then settle into orbit. NASA aims to practice operating the spacecraft, test the conditions crews will experience on and around the Moon, and assure everyone that the spacecraft and any occupants can safely return to Earth.

The Conversation asked Jack Burns, a professor and space scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and former member of the Presidential Transition Team for NASA, to describe the mission, explain what the Artemis program promises to do for space exploration, and reflect on how the space program has changed in the half-century since humans last set foot on the lunar surface.

How does Artemis 1 differ from the other rockets being launched routinely?

Artemis 1 is going to be the first flight of the new Space Launch System. This is a “heavy lift” vehicle, as NASA refers to it. It will be the most powerful rocket engine ever flown to space, even more powerful than Apollo’s Saturn V system that took astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and ‘70s.

It’s a new type of rocket system, because it has both a combination of liquid oxygen and hydrogen main engines and two strap-on solid rocket boosters derived from the space shuttle. It’s really a hybrid between the space shuttle and Apollo’s Saturn V rocket.

Testing is very important, because the Orion Crew Capsule is going to be getting a real workout. It will be in the space environment of the Moon, a high-radiation environment, for a month. And, very importantly, it will be testing the heat shield, which protects the capsule and its occupants, when it comes back to the Earth at 25,000 miles per hour. This will be the fastest capsule reentry since Apollo, so it’s very important that the heat shield function well.

This mission is also going to carry a series of small satellites that will be placed in orbit of the Moon. Those will do some useful precursor science, everything from looking further into the permanently shadowed craters where scientists think there is water to just doing more measurements of the radiation environment, seeing what the effects will be on humans for long-term exposure.

What’s the goal of the Artemis project? What’s coming up in the series of launches?

The mission is a first step toward Artemis 3, which is going to result in the first human missions to the Moon in the 21st century and the first since 1972. Artemis 1 is an uncrewed test flight.

Artemis 2, which is scheduled to launch a few years after that, will have astronauts on board. It, too, will be an orbital mission, very much like Apollo 8, which circled the Moon and came back home. The astronauts will spend a longer time orbiting the Moon and will test everything with a human crew.

And, finally, that will lead to a journey to the surface of the Moon in which Artemis 3 – sometime mid-decade – will rendezvous with the SpaceX Starship and transfer crew. Orion will remain in orbit, and the lunar Starship will take the astronauts to the surface. They will go to the south pole of the Moon to look at an area scientists haven’t explored before to investigate the water ice there.

Artemis is reminiscent of Apollo. What has changed in the past half-century?

The reason for Apollo that Kennedy envisioned initially was to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. The administration didn’t particularly care about space travel, or about the Moon itself, but it represented an audacious goal that would clearly put America first in terms of space and technology.

The downside of doing that is the old saying “You live by the sword, you die by the sword.” When the U.S. got to the Moon, it was basically game over. We beat the Russians. So we put some flags down and did some science experiments. But pretty quickly after Apollo 11, within a few more missions, Richard Nixon canceled the program because the political objectives had been met.

So fast-forward 50 years. This is a very different environment. We are not doing this to beat the Russians or the Chinese or anybody else, but to begin a sustainable exploration beyond Earth’s orbit.

The Artemis program is driven by a number of different goals. It includes in situ resource utilization, which means using resources at hand like water ice and lunar soil to produce food, fuel and building materials.

The program is also helping to establish a lunar and space economy, starting with entrepreneurs, because SpaceX is very much part of this first mission to the surface of the Moon. NASA doesn’t own the Starship but is buying seats to allow astronauts to go to the surface. SpaceX will then use the Starship for other purposes – to transport other payloads, private astronauts and astronauts from other countries.

Fifty years of technology development means that going to the Moon now is much less expensive and more technologically feasible, and much more sophisticated experiments are possible when you just figure the computer technology. Those 50 years of technological advancement have been a complete game-changer. Almost anybody with the financial resources can send spacecraft to the Moon now, though not necessarily with humans.

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services contracts private companies to build uncrewed landers to go to the Moon. My colleagues and I have a radio telescope that’s going to the Moon on one of the landers in January. That just wouldn’t have been possible even 10 years ago.

What other changes does Artemis have in store?

The administration has said that in that first crewed flight, on Artemis 3, there will be at least one woman and very likely a person of color. They may be one and the same. There may be several.

I’m looking forward to seeing more of that diversity, because young kids today who are looking up at NASA can say, “Hey, there’s an astronaut who looks like me. I can do this. I can be part of the space program.”

Jack Burns, Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As global temperatures rise, people in the tropics, including places like India and Africa’s Sahel region, will likely face dangerously hot conditions almost daily by the end of the century – even as the world reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, a new study shows.

The mid-latitudes, including the U.S., will also face increasing risks. There, the number of dangerously hot days, marked by temperatures and humidity high enough to cause heat exhaustion, is projected to double by the 2050s and continue to rise.

In the study, scientists looked at population growth, economic development patterns, energy choices and climate models to project how heat index levels – the combination of heat and humidity – will change over time. We asked University of Washington atmospheric scientist David Battisti, a co-author of the study, published Aug. 25, 2022, to explain the findings and what they mean for humans around the world.

What does the new study tell us about heat waves in the future, and importantly the impact on people?

There are two sources of uncertainty when it comes to future temperature. One is how much carbon dioxide humans are going to emit – that depends on things like population, energy choices and how much the economy grows. The other is how much warming those greenhouse gas emissions will cause.

In both, scientists have a really good sense of the likelihood of various scenarios. For this study, we combined those estimates to get a likelihood in the future of having dangerous and life-threatening temperatures.

We looked at what these “dangerously high” and “extremely dangerous” levels on the heat index would mean for daily life in both the tropics and in the mid-latitudes.

“Dangerous” in this case refers to the likelihood of heat exhaustion. Heat exhaustion won’t kill you if you’re able to stop and slow down – it’s characterized by fatigue, nausea, a slowed heartbeat, possibly fainting. But you really can’t work under these conditions.

The heat index indicates when a person is likely to reach that threshold. The National Weather Service defines “dangerous” as a heat index of 103 F (39.4 C), and “extremely dangerous” as 125 F (51.7 C). If a person gets to “extremely dangerous” temperatures, that can lead to heat stroke. At that level, you have a few hours to get medical attention to cool your body down, or you die.

“Extremely dangerous” heat index conditions are almost unheard of today. They happen in a few locations near the Gulf of Oman, for example, for maybe a few days in a decade.

But the odds of the number of “dangerous” days are increasing as the planet warms. We’ll likely have about the same weather variability as today, but it’s all happening on top of a higher average temperature. So, the likelihood of extremely hot conditions increases.

What does your study show for each region?

In the mid-latitudes by 2050, we’ll see the number of dangerous heat days double in the most likely future scenario – even under modest greenhouse gas emissions that would meet the Paris climate agreement target of keeping warming under 2 C (3.6 F).

In the Southeastern U.S., the most likely scenario is that people will experience a month or two of dangerous heat days every year. The same is likely in parts of China, where some regions have been sweating through a summer 2022 heat wave for over two straight months.

We found that by the end of the century, most places in the mid-latitudes will see a three- to tenfold increase in the number of dangerous days.

In the tropics, such as parts of India, the heat index right now can exceed the dangerous level for a few weeks a year. It’s been like that for the past 20 to 30 years. By 2050, those conditions are likely to occur over several months each year, we found. And by the end of the century, many places will see those conditions most of the year.

What that means in practice is if you’re a rich country like the U.S., most people can afford or find air conditioning. But if you’re in the tropics, where about half the world’s population lives and poverty is higher, the heat is a more serious problem for a good part of the year. And a large percentage of people there work outside in agriculture.

As we get toward the end of the century, we’ll start exceeding “extremely dangerous” conditions in several places, primarily in the tropics.

Northern India could see over a month per year in extremely dangerous conditions. Africa’s Sahel region, where poverty is widespread, could see a few weeks of extremely dangerous conditions per year.

Can humans adapt to what sounds like a dystopian future?

If you’re a rich country, you can build cooling facilities and generate electricity to run air conditioners – hopefully they won’t be powered with fossil fuels, which would further warm the planet.

If you’re a developing country, a very large fraction of people work outdoors in agriculture to earn money to buy food. There, if you think about it, there aren’t a lot of options.

Migrant workers in the U.S. also face more difficult conditions. A farm might be able to provide cooling facilities, but farmers’ margins are pretty small and migrant workers are often paid by volume, so when they aren’t picking, they aren’t paid.

Eventually, conditions will get to the point that more workers are overheating and dying.

The heat will be a problem for crops, too. We expect most of the major grains to be less productive in the future because of heat stress. In the mid-latitudes right now, we’re close to optimal temperatures for growing grains. But as temperatures increase, grain yield goes down. In the tropics, that could be anywhere between a 10% to 15% reduction per degree Celsius increase. That’s a pretty big hit.

What can be done to avoid these risks?

Part of our work in this study was determining the odds that the world will actually meet the Paris agreement. We found that to be around 0.1%. Basically, it’s not going to happen.

By the end of the century, we found the most likely scenario is that the planet will see 5.4 F (3 C) of warming globally compared to pre-industrial times. Land warms faster than ocean, so that translates to about a 7 F (3.9 C) increase for places where we live, work and play – and you can get a sense of the future.

The faster renewable energy comes online and fossil fuel use is shut down, the better the chances of avoiding that.

David Battisti, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The U.S. government will likely report in September 2022 that for 2021 its most accurate measure of child poverty was the lowest on record. This was due, in large part, to generous government benefits. Our research suggests child poverty in 2021 would have been even lower had the government made it easier for families to receive these benefits.

One way the federal government responded to the economic upheaval that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic was to boost the money Americans got as benefits – and to distribute those benefits to people who didn’t previously get them.

Starting in the spring of 2020, for example, most Americans received a series of economic relief payments. Those funds helped reduce child poverty, which fell to 9.7% in 2020 from 12.6% in 2019, according to what’s known as the “supplemental poverty measure.”

Research that we and other economists have conducted indicates that the share of American children living in poverty fell even further in 2021. One key policy change brought about this decline: The government temporarily expanded the child tax credit, boosting the incomes of nearly all families with children.

We have determined, however, that child poverty would have plunged much more had the government done a better job ensuring that all who qualified got the credit.

Child tax credit

Unlike the official poverty rate, the supplemental poverty measure accounts for government benefits, such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The supplemental poverty measure has been consistently lower for children than the official poverty rate since its launch in 2011.

One reason for this is the child tax credit. It began in 1998, with a maximum possible credit of $400 per child. The amount families could get was limited by the income taxes they owed. Since low-income families either don’t pay any income taxes or owe very little, this did them little good. Subsequent reform measures increased both the amount of the credit and made some of this benefit available to families that paid no income tax.

A large federal spending package enacted in 2021 increased the credit further and made it available to all but the wealthiest families with children. Between July 2021 and June 2022, most received up to $3,600 for each child under 6 and as much as $3,000 for kids between the ages of 6 and 17. The Internal Revenue Service distributed half this money in monthly payments between July and December 2021, and the rest at tax time in 2022.

3 million fewer children in poverty

Many economists predicted that this benefit would help millions of children escape poverty.

A Columbia University research team that tracks child poverty rates on a monthly basis calculated that the child tax credit expansion reduced child poverty by about 29% in December 2021 compared with what it would have been without the credit. That would translate into 3 million fewer children in poverty.

If confirmed, that would be an extremely positive result. But we estimate that the child poverty rate could have fallen even further had the government ensured that more eligible families received the expanded child tax credit last year.

As we recently explained in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, an academic publication, we reviewed detailed 2019 data to estimate what would have happened to child poverty that year had all eligible families received the 2021 tax credit expansion. We found that child poverty would have declined an additional 9 percentage points from what the Columbia team estimated for December, or 38%.

We believe the best explanation for this gap is that many low-income families didn’t file a tax return in 2019 or 2020 because they didn’t owe federal income taxes. To get monthly child tax credits from the IRS, these families needed to file a return.

Alternatively, families could log in to the IRS website and apply for the child tax credit. That was hard to do for many low-income people who lacked internet access.

Lack of awareness

Surveys by a Washington University in St. Louis research team support our theory. It found that 29% of low- and moderate-income Americans knew little or nothing about the child tax credit expansion – or even that they were eligible to receive it.

Specifically, 78% of those surveyed who did not file a 2020 tax return didn’t know much about the credit. Furthermore, some journalists found that the IRS website people must use to apply for benefits when they didn’t file a tax return was not user-friendly, and no Spanish version was available.

These findings suggest that expanding the child tax credit can greatly reduce child poverty. They also point to the need for increased outreach efforts to ensure that all low-income Americans can obtain the benefits for which they are eligible.

We will learn more when the Census Bureau releases its 2021 poverty statistics in September 2022. Based on our estimates and those of other research teams, we expect to see that the child tax credit expansion led to a further sharp decline in the the supplemental poverty rate for children.

If that’s the case, there should be loud calls for this benefit to be restored on a permanent basis.

Steven Pressman, Adjunct Professor of Economics, The New School and Robert H. Scott III, Professor, Dept. of Economics, Finance & Real Estate, Monmouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.