The Bezos Theory of Value Is Deeply Disturbing

BY WILLIAM BANKS  ALEX N. PRESS

JACOBIN

In his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos offers a novel — and profoundly disturbing — conception of value creation: a handful of visionaries are the sole source of all “real value.” This aristocracy mercifully blesses customers, clients, and even Amazon workers with social goods.

Jeff Bezos laughs as he participates in a discussion at the 

Economic Club Of Washington on September 13, 2018 in

 Washington, DC. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Since readers of this magazine are not likely to be among the roughly 14 percent of Americans who actively buy and sell stocks, you may not be familiar with the spring ritual that is the CEO’s Letter to Shareholders. And if you are aware of the genre, you may be forgiven for never having paid much mind to what is, almost by definition, an exercise in cheerful banality; according to one recent survey, indeed, a mere 3 percent of CEO letters qualify as “worth reading.”

One of the handful of executives who fall into this small category is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose annual musings have since 1997 consistently bucked the norm, so much so that business and thought leaders around the world have long mined his letters not only for actionable intelligence on Amazon’s prospects, but even more so for the gnomic bits of managerial and entrepreneurial wisdom he so generously dispenses.

Expectations for his most recent letter, issued on April 15, were unusually high. On the one hand the COVID-19 crisis and the recent union drive in Bessemer had brought extraordinary scrutiny down upon the company’s labor practices, and on the other, just as importantly, the 2021 edition would be his last, given his announced plans to step down as CEO, effective July 5. That Bezos does not disappoint is rather an understatement, for in this remarkable document we are provided with a rare glimpse into the recesses of the mind of this singular figure who has done so much to shape the world we inhabit.

Among the more curious aspects of our unhappy age is that so many of our contemporary tech titans appear to find little satisfaction in the unprecedented fortunes they have accumulated and the immense power that tends to follow such wealth. Instead they demand even more of our attention, often, as in the case with Bezos, by insisting on being taken seriously as thinkers, as men of great vision and bold ideas in the mold of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosopher-artist-saint. For those of us who remain unpersuaded by this gesture, such exercises as Bezos’s final shareholder letter come off as rather pathetic, as incoherent patchworks of management speak dressed up as profundity.

Think here of John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, in which the burlesque-club owner Cosmo Vitelli conceives of his productions as nothing less than serious works of stagecraft, always chafing at how his patrons can’t see the art for the flesh. That Bezos’s letter is characterized by its intellectual paucity, its ethical bankruptcy, its rhetorical clumsiness, is immediately evident to anyone outside the triumphalist bubble of the business and tech press. And yet we ignore it at our peril.Bezos seeks to portray Amazon as not merely a profit-generating machine, but also a fount of social goods that in the firm’s absence would never have materialized.

In the end it matters little that Bezos’s talents do not include the ability to express himself coherently and persuasively, for unlike Vitelli he possesses the financial resources and the political muscle to exert an almost incalculable influence over our lives, up to and including the very future direction of our species. However absurd it may seem, Bezos’s final shareholder letter demands the scrutiny of close reading and rigorous critique, for much indeed is at stake here.

In a document as filled with misrepresentations and rhetorical sleights of hand as the 2021 shareholder letter, we are going to need to pick and choose our quibbles; the analysis that follows, accordingly, is thus limited to the second and third sections of the text, for it is here that the author rises far up above the pablum typical of the genre.

It is customary for the CEO to offer a summary of the firm’s performance in the previous year, with emphasis on profit, the figure in which shareholders are most if not exclusively interested. Bezos, however, gives us much more, indeed a careful if rather questionable accounting of the “total value” created by Amazon in 2020, which he estimates at no less than $301 billion, only $21 billion of which, he stresses, constitutes net income. For a full measure of the company’s impact on the economy, we must add to this the $25 billion paid out to third-party sellers; the $91 billion dispersed in salaries, wages, and benefits; and the $164 billion in time-savings and increased efficiency provided to Prime members and Amazon Web Services (AWS) clients.

His intent is clear: to portray Amazon as not merely a profit-generating machine, but also a fount of social goods that in the firm’s absence would never have materialized.

Thus in the commentary following the “total value” table, Bezos, perhaps unwittingly, provides us with nothing less than a full-blown theory of value. Of the $301 billion, he says:

These numbers are part of the reason why people come to work for us, why sellers sell through us, and why customers buy from us. We create value for them. And this value is not a zero-sum game. It is not just moving money from one pocket to another. Draw the box big around all of society, and you’ll find that invention is the root of all real value creation. And value created is best thought of as a metric for innovation.

On the surface there is nothing controversial about this, especially since mainstream economists have long taken it as an article of faith that “value created tracks with innovation,” or, more commonly, that “innovation drives growth.” But Bezos says far more, insisting that “invention” is the ultimate source of all value — or at least his curious conception of “real value.”

What precisely he means by “real value” remains unclear, but there might be clues in the history of political economy, for the odor of the Austrian School, and particularly of Friedrich von Hayek, is strong here. As Corey Robin has argued, the Marginal Revolution of the late nineteenth century was motivated principally by dissatisfaction with the old labor theory value, which animated not just Karl Marx and the broader socialist movement, but the Classical School of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. At its heart, marginalism was the effort to recenter our understanding of economic life on the figure of the consumer rather than, as had been the case for a century, the worker.

While there is nothing inherently reactionary or conservative in this gesture, later marginalists, specifically those who emerged out of fin de siècle Vienna — Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Hayek — would self-consciously employ the doctrine as a means to beat back the rising assertiveness of ordinary workers, who as Robin notes increasingly saw themselves as “the centerpiece of modern civilization” and the primary motor of not only “the economy but culture and society as well.”

It was Hayek who took this furthest, effectively inverting the social-democratic understanding of Marginalism, according to which it was “the worker — in his capacity as consumer — who gave value to capital.” For Hayek and the Austrians, in absolute contrast, it is capital that provides value to labor; indeed the figure of the man of capital, previously the model of sober rationality, is recast as nothing less than a promethean visionary, as a “heroic legislator value” possessed of the intuitive capacity to sense the dim outlines of the not-yet and the force of will to make it reality. When Bezos reminds us that Amazon executives “live in the future,” he is calling back to this older conception of the men of capital as a kind of benevolent aristocracy, as creators of “real value” of which all us ordinary souls are the ungrateful beneficiaries.

That Bezos sees himself and his colleagues as a new form of aristocracy is evident in his curious employment of the first-person plural pronoun, as in the above excerpt, in which he claims that “people work for us” because “we create value for them” and that “we need a better vision for how to create value for employees – a vision for their success.”

What this suggests is Bezos does not consider the hundreds of thousands of hourly employees and contractors who pick and pack and deliver the goods to play any significant role in the creation of “real value.” It is rather the prerogative of “we” the “inventors” up in the C-suite or over in the R&D lab. Mere “employees” are hardly different from the customers, clients, and third-party sellers; the only significant distinction is that rather than providing goods and services for a fee, we provide you with a living in exchange for your labor.It is customary for the CEO to devote at least a token paragraph of the shareholder letter to acknowledging that the employees constitute the heart and the soul of the firm. But this Bezos cannot bring himself to do.

While it is not uncommon for those atop the commanding heights of the capitalist economy to harbor such views, it is unusual to state them so openly, so brazenly. It is indeed customary that the CEO devotes at least a token paragraph of the shareholder letter to acknowledging that the employees constitute the heart and the soul of the firm, that they are its greatest asset, that nothing would be possible without them.

But this Bezos cannot bring himself to do, even in the wake of intensifying scrutiny of his firm’s abysmal labor record. After the firing and the defamation of rank-and-file organizer Christian Smalls, after the headlines about workers’ inability to use restrooms while on the clock, and after the millions lavished on beating back the union challenge in Bessemer, the smallest gesture, the mere acknowledgement that no packages would have arrived at doorsteps without the toil of hundreds of thousands of human beings, might very well have gone a long way.

Bezos’s reticence in this respect is all the more galling given that of the Big Five tech firms, Amazon is by far the most “traditional.” Facebook, Google, and Microsoft produce few if any material goods; Apple most certainly does, but its production has largely been outsourced to the Global South, far away from the prying eyes of meddling US labor unions and journalists.

Amazon is something wholly different. It arguably should not be considered a tech company, but rather a logistics giant, an online emporium hardly distinct from eBay, and, with the establishment of AWS, a utility. Its fulfillment centers dot the deindustrialized landscape of America’s hinterlands, and its dark-blue vans are everywhere, their hard-pressed drivers emerging at breakneck pace in the increasingly vain effort to make quota.

In one of the more disingenuous passages in his letter, Bezos notes that “we’re also proud of the fact that Amazon is a company that does more than create jobs for computer scientists and people with advanced degrees. We create jobs for people who never got that advantage.” This conveniently conceals the fact that the majority of Amazon employees are engaged in fulfillment and delivery, and that the disparity between the “advantaged” and the “disadvantaged” increases dramatically when we account for the multitudes of seasonal temps and the so-called “independent contractors” who drive the vans.

It also inflates one of the more insidious myths of meritocracy: the patently absurd suggestion that if only we can live up to our ideals, if only we might provide an advanced degree to all, then somehow the demand for toil in the fulfillment centers and out on the roads would mysteriously vanish. There may have been a moment when Amazon.com really was a scrappy upstart dream, a small handful of brilliant and highly educated dreamers out to change the world. But that moment passed long ago; what the company predominately is now, and has been for a long time, is a globe-spanning logistics empire. The hundreds of thousands of pickers and packers and drivers are the company, no matter how distasteful this is to its founder.When Bezos reminds us that Amazon executives ‘live in the future,’ he is harking back to an older conception of the men of capital as a kind of benevolent aristocracy.

Jeff Bezos in 2018. (Wikimedia Commons)

That Bezos is profoundly uneasy about what his company has become is clearly evident in the painfully awkward third section of the letter, in which he responds to the torrent of recent bad press on his company’s abysmal record of workplace injuries. At the very least he is compelled to reassure the shareholders that senior leadership is aware of the issues and is taking appropriate measures for their remedy.

But as always he does much more than expected, although unsurprisingly he cannot be moved to offer up any sort of apology for the well-documented fact that Amazon warehouse employees suffer serious injury at more than twice the rate of the industry average. Instead he returns to the curious logic of “real value,” implicitly conceding that the “company” has failed to serve its “employees” with the same obsessiveness it has lavished on its customers. But this is soon to change:

In my upcoming role as Executive Chair, I’m going to focus on new initiatives. I’m an inventor. It’s what I enjoy and what I do best. It’s where I create the most value. I’m excited to work alongside the large team of passionate people we have in ops and help invent in this arena of Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. We have never failed when we set our minds to something, and we’re not going to fail at this either.

Let us pass over the astounding effrontery of all this, the baronial refusal to acknowledge that workers themselves might have some insight into their own well-being, might have some role to play here. Instead we get that signal feature of contemporary techno-capitalist thinking, the insistence that whatever the problem, the best solution is “innovation.”

Much of the negative press coverage this past year, for example, concerned the scandalous rate of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) among Amazon workers. While Bezos does acknowledge the problem, he does so at the noticeable expense of pronoun discipline, remarking that “MSDs are common in the type of work that we do,” as if he himself is not above occasionally taking a place on the packaging line.

Now that he and his team are on the problem, however, it is surely only a matter of time before novel techniques, such as last year’s WorkingWell program and the more recent, much-lampooned AmaZen initiative, will begin to whittle down the numbers; indeed, Bezos proudly notes, the company’s efforts already reduced the rate by 32 percent between 2019 and 2020.

These comments would seem to suggest that the thousands of “safety professionals” employed by the company are at the very bleeding edge of MSD mitigation, that just as Amazon previously “led the way on wages,” they now do the same with respect to workplace injuries. The typical reader of the letter might very well be led to believe that MSDs are something new.

The truth, however, is that the condition has been a part of established scientific consensus for more than three decades; modest OSHA regulations for ergonomic health were first proposed during the Clinton administration and appeared well on their way to becoming law, before a furious Chamber of Commerce lobbying campaign and the election of George W. Bush put them to bed for good.

OSHA’s voluntary guidelines, however, are readily available, and Amazon could very well have “led” on the issue by implementing them, by employing their much-celebrated capacity for innovation toward the design of a work environment optimized for worker health. Instead, as has been widely covered in recent years, they did the precise opposite, developing novel techniques for the extraction of labor from the human body not seen since the high tide of Taylorism a century ago.

As Will Evans described in his Reveal expose last September, Amazon’s safety crisis reached peak intensity in the years after the introduction of robots into its warehouses in 2014. At least nominally intended to reduce the stress on workers’ bodies, the robots instead dramatically increased the injury rates — they are simply too efficient, the human body incapable of keeping up with them without serious health risks.

Amazon’s internal records, which were inspected by Evans, show that the company’s safety experts were aware of this almost immediately, and as early as December 2015 it caught the attention of OSHA, which issued a sternly worded hazard letter specifically linking the robots to a long series of ergonomic risk factors. All of this was roundly ignored by the company, as the ops department, aided and abetted by the “safety professionals,” continued to tighten the screws, the injury rate steadily climbing, year after year, until finally the damage to the company’s reputation became too costly.The ‘passionate people’ now committed to remaking Amazon as Earth’s Safest Place to Work are the very same people who knowingly made it among the world’s more unsafe.

It’s still too early to judge the results of WorkingWell and AmaZen, but there is every reason to be skeptical; the “passionate people” now committed to remaking Amazon as Earth’s Safest Place to Work are, after all, the very same people who knowingly made it among the world’s more unsafe.

In one of Donald Trump’s more memorable bits from the 2016 campaign, he often suggested that since he had been paying off politicians for decades, no one was more qualified to put an end to political corruption. Bezos’s promise to innovate his way out of a crisis directly resulting from the company’s own innovation rings similarly hollow.

Arguably the last thing Amazon’s hundreds of thousands of workers need is more innovation; indeed, as Dania Rajendra has argued, the company’s much-praised reinvention of the warehouse and delivery sectors is better understood as the revival of once-discredited labor practices: the company town, Taylorist surveillance, churn and burn.

Our nineteenth- and twentieth-century ancestors, we must always remind ourselves, found such conditions intolerable. They began to organize themselves, to fight back against capital with whatever meager means at hand, and gradually they won for us, at least for a brief moment, a brighter world.

Bezos and his like among the new aristocracy of capital seek to take that away from us, to return to a far uglier, far crueler mode of being in the world, in which we ordinary souls constitute so much human clay to be molded and used up by those few who know better, who indeed are better. We must not allow them to succeed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Banks is a writer, editor, and translator. His latest book, Brandes contra Høffding: Nietzsche, Individual Greatness and the Welfare Society, is forthcoming in 2022.

Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Vox, the Nation, and n+1, among other places.

Donald Rumsfeld, Rot in Hell

BY BEN BURGIS

Bush administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is dead at the age of 88. It's a tragedy that Rumsfeld died before he could be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in 2010. Wikimedia Commons


Donald Rumsfeld just died at the age of eighty-eight. Obituaries at outlets like the New York Times and CNN consistently mention the same memorable but pointless bits of trivia. He was America’s youngest secretary of defense (in the Ford administration) and the oldest (in the George W. Bush administration). He wrote so many memos about so many subjects that they came to be known as “snowflakes.” Arriving at the Pentagon in the 1970s, the Times tells us, he became famous for “his one-handed push-ups and his prowess on a squash court.”

To see the full absurdity of this, imagine an obituary of Slobodan Milosevic that lingered on innocuous details of his office management style and fondness for soccer, or an obituary of Saddam Hussein that focused on how young he was when he formally became president of Iraq in 1979 and his favorite dessert in his Baghdad palace.

Rumsfeld served in a variety of positions in the Nixon administration throughout Tricky Dick’s first term. He left the White House in 1973 to become the US ambassador to NATO, only to return after Nixon’s resignation to become transition chairman and then the White House Chief of Staff for President Ford. He was Chief of Staff until 1975 — the year the last American helicopter left Vietnam. In October of that year, he became secretary of defense.

To put these bland facts into perspective, remember that Richard Nixon ran on the absurd claim that he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, as Christopher Hitchens explains in detail in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Nixon and his allies conspired to sabotage peace talks between the United States and North and South Vietnam in order to guarantee that Nixon would win the election.

Nixon’s “plan” was, at least in practice, to slowly lose the war — but only after expanding it by bombing and invading neutral Cambodia. During Rumsfeld’s years at the Nixon and Ford White Houses and then NATO, the American Empire was shooting, dismembering, and quite literally burning alive vast numbers of Vietnamese peasants in order to preserve a corrupt and wildly unpopular US-aligned regime.

During this time, Nixon can be heard on his White House tapes referring to Donald Rumsfeld as a “ruthless little bastard.” It’s worth taking a beat to think about what sort of person would earn that kind of admiration from Nixon, a man who illegally conspired against his domestic political enemies and oversaw genocidal levels of deaths in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia

.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responds to questions during a panel interview on Oct. 6, 1976. Robert D. Ward / Wikimedia Commons

To be fair, Rumsfeld spent the first year or so of his time in the Nixon administration helping to shut down programs to help poor people in this country as the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity. In several other positions, though, he was directly involved with the imperial war machine. That alone might have been enough to earn him a stiff punishment if the standards the United States applied to captured war criminals after World War II were ever applied to American officials.

But Rumsfeld’s most significant personal involvement in crimes against humanity happened later, during his second stint as Secretary of Defense. He oversaw the invasion of Afghanistan, kicking off the longest war in US history.

The official justification was that the Taliban government refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden to the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Consistently applied, the principle that harboring terrorists is sufficient grounds for war would license Cuba to bomb Miami. It would also justify escalating any number of tense stand-offs between pairs of nations around the world into all-out warfare and chaos. But the whole point of being an empire is that you get to play by different rules than the rest of the world.

During Rumsfeld’s second year as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, when Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest of the gang were pushing for an invasion of Iraq, the justification was even weaker. Saddam Hussein, we were told, might use “weapons of mass destruction” himself, or share them with Al Qaeda at some point in the future. So it was important to cluster-bomb, invade, and occupy the whole country to make sure that never happened. Ya know, just in case. Imagine if the rest of the world got to play by that rule

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Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld speaks to military personnel at the Abu Ghraib Prison May 13, 2004 on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq. Jim MacMillan-Pool / Getty Images

In an infamous column that year at the National Review, Jonah Goldberg made the bluntest version of the case for invading Iraq, approvingly quoting an old speech by his friend Michael Ledeen: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Warming to the same theme around the same time at the New York Times, Thomas Friedman said that “these countries” and their “terrorist” pals were being sent an important message by the very unpredictability of the Bush Administration’s warmongering: We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. “We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”


Here’s what the craziness of Donald Rumsfeld looked like in practice for the citizens of the “crappy little countries” the United States picked and threw against the wall during Rumsfeld’s years as Bush’s Secretary of Defense: a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, in 2006 — the year Rumsfeld left office — estimated 654,965 “excess deaths” in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. That’s 2.5 percent of the total population of the country dead as a result of the violence.

This doesn’t, of course, take into account the spiraling waves of chaos and bloodshed that have continued to rock the region throughout the eighteen years since the region was destabilized by the 2003 invasion. A similar story has played out on a smaller scale in Afghanistan — where US troops are still present and wedding parties are still being bombed almost two decades after Rumsfeld and his friends got their invasion.

And this counting of corpses leaves out the heartbreak of families in these countries that lost loved ones. It leaves out the millions of refugees displaced from their homes. It leaves out the suffering of people who had limbs blown off or had to care for people who did.

And it leaves out one of the most gut-wrenching aspects of Rumsfeld’s time in office: his and President Bush’s open embrace of what they called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or what any human being with a shred of conscience would simply call “torture.” Suspects illegally detained on suspicion of involvement in terrorism (or even involvement in resistance against the invasions of their countries) were tortured under Rumsfeld’s watch in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the notoriously lawless “facility” at Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere around the world. Some of that was done under the auspices of the CIA. But much of it fell under the purview of Rumsfeld’s department of defense

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Spc. Charles Graner and Spc. Sabrina Harman with naked and hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. The prisoners were forced to form a human pyramid. Wikimedia Commons

In 2006, Berlin attorney Wolfgang Kaleck filed a formal criminal complaint against Rumsfeld and several other American officials for their involvement in torture. Needless to say, Rumsfeld never had to see the inside of a courtroom in Germany or anywhere else.

In that sense, and only in that sense, Donald Rumsfeld died too soon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor and the author of Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left. He is host of the podcast Give Them An Argument.

NASA still trying to identify what took Hubble offline

Space agency needs to know exactly what's wrong in order to switch to backup hardware.

JOHN TIMMER - 7/1/2021

Enlarge

On June 13, the Hubble Space Telescope took itself offline due to a fault in its payload computer, which manages the telescope's scientific instruments. Since then, NASA has been doing the sort of troubleshooting that's familiar to many of us—with the added pressure of the hardware being irreplaceable, in space, and about the same vintage as a Commodore 64.

So far, controllers have managed to figure out several things that are not at fault, based on attempted fixes that haven't worked. The workers have narrowed the problem down, but they haven't pinpointed it. And at this point, the next steps will depend on the precise nature of the problem, so getting a diagnosis is the top priority.
If at first you don’t succeed...

The hardware at issue is part of the payload computer system, which contains a control processor, a communications bus, a memory module, and a processor that formats data and commands so that the controller can "speak" to all the individual science instruments (the system also converts the data that the instruments produce into a standard format for transmission to Earth). There's also a power supply that is supposed to keep everything operating at the proper voltage.Advertisement

Being cautious sorts, the people who designed Hubble provided a backup controller and three backup memory modules.

Initial indications showed a potential problem with the memory module, so the first attempt to restore the Hubble involved trying to switch to one of the backups. That fix failed, suggesting that the odd memory behavior was just a symptom of problems elsewhere. Switching to the backup controller also failed to fix the problem; no matter which combination of controller and memory module was used, Hubble could not read or write to the memory.

Given that information, the controllers have turned their attention elsewhere. Prime candidates are now the power supply, the data bus, and the data formatting processor. It's still possible to switch to the backup controller and memory, but the sequence of the procedure will differ based on exactly what is at fault. In a press release, NASA referred to this process as "more complex and riskier."

But we also have reason for optimism: a data formatter failed in 2008, and NASA successfully switched to backups, which operated until a servicing mission replaced the failed hardware.

Given that NASA no longer has access to a vehicle designed for those sorts of servicing missions, getting a functional backup in place will be essential if we want to squeeze more years out of this one-of-a-kind observatory.

Jeff Bezos picks female aerospace pioneer to launch with him

In this 2019 photo made available by NASA, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk visits the Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio. On Thursday, July 1, 2021, Blue Origin announced the early female aerospace pioneer will be aboard the company’s July 20 launch from West Texas, flying as an “honored guest.” (NASA via AP)

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press
Published Thursday, July 1, 2021 3:07PM EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Sixty years after acing astronaut tests but barred because she was a woman, Wally Funk will rocket into space alongside Jeff Bezos in just three weeks.

Bezos' company Blue Origin announced Thursday that the pioneering pilot will be aboard the July 20 launch from West Texas, flying in the capsule as an “honored guest.” She'll join Bezos, his brother and the winner of a $28 million charity auction, as the first people to ride a New Shepard rocket.

At 82, she'll be the oldest person to launch into space.

Funk is among the so-called Mercury 13 women who went through astronaut testing in the early 1960s, but never made it to space - or even NASA's astronaut corps - because they were female. Back then, all of NASA's astronauts were male military test pilots.

Funk said she feels “fabulous” about finally getting the chance to go to space.

“I'll love every second of it. Whoooo! Ha-ha. I can hardly wait,” Funk said in an Instagram video posted by Bezos.

“Nothing has ever gotten in my way,” she added. “They said, `Well, you're a girl, you can't do that.' I said, 'Guess what, doesn't matter what you are. You can still do it if you want to do it and I like to do things that nobody has ever done.”

In a cosmic twist, she'll beat the late John Glenn, who set a record at age 77 when flying aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Glenn pooh-poohed the idea of women flying in space, shortly after he became the first American to orbit the world in 1962.

“No one has waited longer,” Bezos said via Instagram. “It's time. Welcome to the crew, Wally.”

The Amazon founder is stepping down as the company's CEO on Monday.

The upcoming launch - which follows 15 successful test flights - will open the door to paying customers. Blue Origin has yet to announce ticket prices or when the public might strap into the spacious six-seat capsule, which reaches an altitude of about 65 miles, just beyond the edge of space. The up-and-down flights last 10 minutes.

The reusable rocket is named for Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and July 20 is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Funk, who lives in Texas, was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. In the posted video, she said she has 19,600 flying hours and has taught more than 3,000 people to fly.

She was among two dozen female pilots who underwent six days of rigorous physical tests - the same ones administered to the Mercury astronaut candidates - in 1960 and 1961. The doctor who had tested the Mercury 7 men had heard the Soviets planned to send a woman to space and he wanted to see if women could endure the effects of weightlessness.

The candidates had to spend hours in an isolation water tank, swallow rubber hose, and get needles stuck in their heads, among other things.

Thirteen of the women - including Funk - passed. But the program was abruptly canceled, and the Soviets went on to launch the first woman into space - Valentina Tereshkova - in 1963.

“They told me that I had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys,” Funk recalled. “So I got hold of NASA four times. I said I want to become an astronaut, but nobody would take me. I didn't think that I would ever get to go up.”

It wasn't until 1983 that the first American woman soared into space - Sally Ride, who died in 2012. And it wasn't until 1995 that an American woman piloted a spaceship - Eileen Collins aboard shuttle Discovery. Many of the Mercury 13 women gathered at Cape Canaveral for that launch.

Keen to get to space, Funk reserved a seat years ago on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic rocket ship. She remains on the passenger list; the company plans three more test flights from New Mexico, one of them with Branson on board, before launching customers.

In the video, Bezos describes to Funk how the four Blue Origin passengers will experience zero gravity for a few minutes, then land gently on the desert surface and open the hatch.

“You step outside. What's the first thing you say?” he asked her.

“I will say, 'Honey, that was the best thing that ever happened to me!” Funk replied, embracing Bezos in a big bear hug.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

 

Are We Missing Other Earths? Dramatic New Evidence Uncovered by Astronomers

By ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITIES FOR RESEARCH IN ASTRONOMY (AURA) JUNE 29, 2021

This illustration depicts a planet partially hidden in the glare of its host star and a nearby companion star. After examining a number of binary stars, astronomers have concluded that Earth-sized planets in many two-star systems might be going unnoticed by transit searches, which look for changes in the light from a star when a planet passes in front of it. The light from the second star makes it more difficult to detect the changes in the host star’s light when the planet passes in front of it. Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva

Astronomers studying stellar pairs uncover evidence that there could be many more Earth-sized planets than previously thought.

Some exoplanet searches could be missing nearly half of the Earth-sized planets around other stars. New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the glare of their parent stars. As roughly half of all stars are in binary systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds.

Earth-sized planets may be much more common than previously realized. Astronomers working at NASA Ames Research Center have used the twin telescopes of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, to determine that many planet-hosting stars identified by NASA’s TESS exoplanet-hunting mission^[1] are actually pairs of stars — known as binary stars — where the planets orbit one of the stars in the pair. After examining these binary stars, the team has concluded that Earth-sized planets in many two-star systems might be going unnoticed by transit searches like TESS’s, which look for changes in the light from a star when a planet passes in front of it.^[2] The light from the second star makes it more difficult to detect the changes in the host star’s light when the planet transits.

The team started out by trying to determine whether some of the exoplanet host stars identified with TESS were actually unknown binary stars. Physical pairs of stars that are close together can be mistaken for single stars unless they are observed at extremely high resolution. So the team turned to both Gemini telescopes to inspect a sample of exoplanet host stars in painstaking detail. Using a technique called speckle imaging,^[3] the astronomers set out to see whether they could spot undiscovered stellar companions.

Using the `Alopeke and Zorro instruments on the Gemini North and South telescopes in Chile and Hawai‘i, respectively,^[4] the team observed hundreds of nearby stars that TESS had identified as potential exoplanet hosts. They discovered that 73 of these stars are really binary star systems that had appeared as single points of light until observed at higher resolution with Gemini. “With the Gemini Observatory’s 8.1-meter telescopes, we obtained extremely high-resolution images of exoplanet host stars and detected stellar companions at very small separations,” said Katie Lester of NASA’s Ames Research Center, who led this work.

Lester’s team also studied an additional 18 binary stars previously found among the TESS exoplanet hosts using the NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet and Stellar Speckle Imager (NESSI) on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, also a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab.

After identifying the binary stars, the team compared the sizes of the detected planets in the binary star systems to those in single-star systems. They realized that the TESS spacecraft found both large and small exoplanets orbiting single stars, but only large planets in binary systems.

These results imply that a population of Earth-sized planets could be lurking in binary systems and going undetected using the transit method employed by TESS and many other planet-hunting telescopes. Some scientists had suspected that transit searches might be missing small planets in binary systems, but the new study provides observational support to back it up and shows which sizes of exoplanets are affected.^[5]

“We have shown that it is more difficult to find Earth-sized planets in binary systems because small planets get lost in the glare of their two parent stars,” Lester stated. “Their transits are ‘filled in’ by the light from the companion star,” added Steve Howell of NASA’s Ames Research Center, who leads the speckle imaging effort and was involved in this research.

“Since roughly 50% of stars are in binary systems, we could be missing the discovery of — and the chance to study — a lot of Earth-like planets,” Lester concluded.

The possibility of these missing worlds means that astronomers will need to use a variety of observational techniques before concluding that a given binary star system has no Earth-like planets. “Astronomers need to know whether a star is single or binary before they claim that no small planets exist in that system,” explained Lester. “If it’s single, then you could say that no small planets exist. But if the host is in a binary, you wouldn’t know whether a small planet is hidden by the companion star or does not exist at all. You would need more observations with a different technique to figure that out.”

As part of their study, Lester and her colleagues also analyzed how far apart the stars are in the binary systems where TESS had detected large planets. The team found that the stars in the exoplanet-hosting pairs were typically farther apart than binary stars not known to have planets.^[6] This could suggest that planets do not form around stars that have close stellar companions.

“This speckle imaging survey illustrates the critical need for NSF telescope facilities to characterize newly discovered planetary systems and develop our understanding of planetary populations,” said National Science Foundation Division of Astronomical Sciences Program Officer Martin Still.

“This is a major finding in exoplanet work,” Howell commented. “The results will help theorists create their models for how planets form and evolve in double-star systems.”

Notes

1. TESS is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a NASA mission designed to search for planets orbiting other stars in a survey of around 75% of the entire night sky. The mission launched in 2018 and has detected more than 3500 candidate exoplanets, of which more than 130 have been confirmed. The satellite looks for exoplanets by observing their host stars; a transiting exoplanet causes a subtle but measurable dip in the brightness of its host star as it crosses in front of the star and blocks some of its light.
2. The transit technique is one way of discovering exoplanets. It involves looking for regular decreases in the light of a star that could be caused by a planet passing in front of or “transiting” the star and blocking some of the starlight.
3. Speckle imaging is an astronomical technique that allows astronomers to see past the blur of the atmosphere by taking many quick observations in rapid succession. By combining these observations, it is possible to cancel out the blurring effect of the atmosphere, which affects ground-based astronomy by causing stars in the night sky to twinkle.
4. `Alopeke & Zorro are identical imaging instruments permanently mounted on the Gemini North and South telescopes. Their names mean “fox” in Hawaiian and Spanish, respectively, reflecting their respective locations on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi and on Cerro Pachón in Chile.
5. The team found that planets twice the size of Earth or smaller could not be detected using the transit method when observing binary systems.
6. Lester’s team found that the exoplanet-hosting binary stars they identified had average separations of about 100 astronomical units. (An astronomical unit is the average distance between the Sun and Earth.) Binary stars that are not known to host planets are typically separated by around 40 astronomical units.
   More information

This research is presented in the paper “Speckle Observations of TESS Exoplanet Host Stars. II. Stellar Companions at 1-1000 AU and Implications for Small Planet Detection” to appear in the Astronomical Journal.

Reference: “Speckle Observations of TESS Exoplanet Host Stars. II. Stellar Companions at 1-1000 AU and Implications for Small Planet Detection” by Kathryn V. Lester, Rachel A. Matson, Steve B. Howell, Elise Furlan, Crystal L. Gnilka, Nicholas J. Scott, David R. Ciardi, Mark E. Everett, Zachary D. Hartman and Lea A. Hirsch, Accepted, Astronomical Journal.
arXiv:2106.13354

The team is composed of Kathryn V. Lester (NASA Ames Research Center), Rachel A. Matson (US Naval Observatory), Steve B. Howell (NASA Ames Research Center), Elise Furlan (Exoplanet Science Institute, Caltech), Crystal L. Gnilka (NASA Ames Research Center), Nicholas J. Scott (NASA Ames Research Center), David R. Ciardi (Exoplanet Science Institute, Caltech), Mark E. Everett (NSF’s NOIRLab), Zachary D. Hartman (Lowell Observatory & Department of Physics & Astronomy, Georgia State University), and Lea A. Hirsch (Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University).

NSF’s NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the US center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the international Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory (operated in cooperation with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.

Astronomers Thrill at Giant Comet Flying into Our Solar System

The huge object may be the biggest comet ever seen. And it is already showing signs of activity as it approaches the orbit of Saturn

By Jonathan O'Callaghan on June 30, 2021

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Image of C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), the largest comet discovered in modern times. It is set to reach the vicinity of Saturn’s orbit in 2031 on its inward journey from the outskirts of the solar system. Credit: Dark Energy

 Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Bernardinelli & G. Bernstein (UPenn)/DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys

Acknowledgments: T. A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) & J. Miller (NSF’s NOIRLab)


Far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, a dark and mysterious expanse of space tantalizes astronomers. Here, as many as trillions of comets are thought to swarm, hurled to their present locale by Jupiter or other planets billions of years ago. They form a giant sphere known as the Oort cloud that envelops the solar system and stretches out to perhaps a couple of light-years from the sun. No one really knows just how many comets exist in the Oort cloud or its true extent because so little illuminating sunlight reaches that remote region. But occasionally a passing star or galactic tides will stir these icy leftovers from the solar system’s dawn, causing comets to fall toward the distant sun and into the observability of our telescopes. These so-called long-period comets have an orbit of thousands or millions of years and are predominantly small, no more than a few kilometers across. Yet last week astronomers announced the discovery of one with truly behemoth proportions: a giant comet that may measure hundreds of kilometers from edge to edge. “It was pretty shocking,” says Pedro Bernardinelli of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the researchers who found the object. Now efforts to train more telescopes in the comet’s direction to unearth its secrets of the deep are well underway.

Initially dubbed 2014 UN271, the object has been officially named C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) for its discoverers: Bernardinelli and his University of Pennsylvania colleague Gary Bernstein. It was first observed in 2014 by a project called the Dark Energy Survey (DES), but Bernardelli and Bernstein only found the comet recently, after it popped out of their analysis of the 80,000 or so images taken by DES over the past several years. The images from 2014 revealed it to be lurking at about 30 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or 30 astronomical units (AU). Now, seven years on, the object is at 20 AU and continuing to approach us. Its closest point to the sun will be 10.9 AU, which it will reach in January 2031. That is not too much farther out than the orbit of Saturn—close enough that some have even envisaged sending a spacecraft to the object on a fleeting visit. Current estimates suggest the comet takes three million years to orbit the sun, traveling out to a distance of nearly 0.9 light-year—well into the Oort cloud—before swooping in again.

Both the object’s size and its looming proximity have captivated astronomers. “It’s very exciting,” says David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles. Despite receiving 400 times less sunlight than Earth’s surface at its current location, the comet is bright enough to be seen by telescopes, which hints that its size must be somewhere between 100 and 370 kilometers. The uncertainty arises because of the object’s unknown reflectivity and shape. But at either end of the scale, this estimate would still make it much bigger than any previously known comet. The next largest in terms of its nucleus—Hale-Bopp, which wowed stargazers in 1997—measured a relatively paltry 60 kilometers across. The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is “certainly the largest comet we’ve seen in the modern astronomical era,” says Alan Fitzsimmons of Queen’s University Belfast. “We’ve had tremendously bright comets over recorded history, but that was before the invention of the telescope [in the 17th century].”

Efforts to study the object since it was announced have been swift. Already a team of astronomers has been able to detect signs of activity, most likely melting ices forming an atmosphere, or “coma,” around its solid nucleus, confirming it to be a comet. “Its brightness has increased a lot, which means that it’s active,” says Rosita Kokotanekova of the European Southern Observatory, who led the observations using a network of telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere. Getting continued rapid observations will be crucial in learning more about the comet. “There might still be a possibility we can see a rotational signal from the nucleus,” Kokotanekova says. “When the activity gets stronger, it will be completely obscured.”

Observing that activity will be enlightening, too, “because we’ve never observed a comet being active so far out [from the sun],” Kokotanekova says. This will allow researchers to probe the regions of the solar system where cometary activity begins. From the object’s initial apparition in DES optics in 2014 to 2018, it did not appear to show activity, meaning it likely “switched on” at some point in the past three years, Fitzsimmons says. “It’s going to give us a really nice ability to study what happens in this transition region—from being a frozen ice ball out in the Oort cloud to a fully active comet in the solar system.”

At its current distance, temperatures are too low for water ice to melt, so the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet—which may be on its first foray into the inner solar system—must have some other type of ice that is melting. “The best guess would be carbon monoxide, because we know that’s present in comets, and it’s also very volatile,” Jewitt says.

In part because astronomers still know so little about the object and have never seen anything quite like it before, its exact nature remains unknown. Is it really a large comet or something else entirely? “Some people are speculating it could be round, almost in hydrostatic equilibrium, which makes it go in the direction of dwarf planets,” Kokotanekova says. This seems unlikely, however, given that most models suggest an icy object must be in the vicinity of 800 kilometers across before its own gravity begins sculpting it into a spherical shape. To pin down the object’s true size, Jewitt says the Hubble Space Telescope is the only current facility with sufficient power to peer through the coma and resolve the size of the nucleus. But as of this writing, his formal request to study the comet using the prized orbital observatory has not been approved. Other telescopes are capable of probing different features, though, such as its composition. “It’s so different from everything else we’ve observed that it’s very likely we’ll discover unexpected things,” Kokotanekova says.

Being able to observe the object for such a long time as it reaches its closest point to the sun, with a decade of observations ahead, will be hugely rewarding. Astronomers will be able to watch as it evolves, perhaps changing in its activity levels or even breaking apart. “The fact we can follow this thing for the next 10 years means there’s a lot of opportunity to discover more detail,” says Colin Snodgrass of the University of Edinburgh. And for the time being, a lot of what we might observe remains tantalizingly unknown, says Michele Bannister of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “This is something that’s been in the deep freeze for eons—hundreds of thousands of years at the very shortest,” she says. “And now it’s being heated by the sun. What’s going to happen? How active is it going to be? We don’t know yet. That’s going to be really fun to find out.”

The comet is also a taste of what is to come in the near future of solar system astronomy. In October 2023 a new telescope in Chile called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin a 10-year survey of the entire overhead sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Thanks in part to its eight-meter mirror, Rubin will be able to discover much fainter objects than any of its predecessors, including many more expected large comets like this. “Typical telescopes find objects out to 50 or 60 AU,” says LSST team member Mario Jurić of the University of Washington. “With LSST, we can easily go out to 150 AU. We’re going to see things like [the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet] maybe on a monthly basis.”

For the time being, C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) remains the largest comet ever seen approaching the inner solar system, offering a glimpse into the secrets of our sun’s outermost reaches. How it behaves as it approaches Saturn’s orbit will be thrilling to watch, and the name Bernardinelli-Bernstein likely will not be forgotten any time soon. “It will be studied for years and years,” Kokotanekova says. “It’s only going to become more interesting. We’ll get to know it very well.”

Unusually Alcoholic Comet That Zipped By Earth Showed Some Very Strange Behavior



COMET 46/WIRTANEN MADE AN USUALLY CLOSE APPROCH TO EARTH IN DECEMBER 2018, INCLUDING THIS SPECTACULAR PASS NEAR THE PLEADIES IN THE SKY. ONLY NOW HAVE WE LEARNED IT WAS PUMPING OUT ALCOHOL AT A SURPRISING RATE AT THE TIME. IMAGE CREDIT: TRAGOOLCHITR JITTASALYAPAN/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM


By Stephen Luntz 

01 JUL 2021

SPACE

Go home Comet Wirtanen, you're drunk. Comets consist of some surprisingly complex molecules, often including alcohol. However, Comet 46P/Wirtanen released an unusually large amount of CH3OH as it flew past Earth in 2018. Perhaps it's not surprising then that it also showed some other strange and as 

Comet Wirtanen is a short-period comet, with an orbit of just 5.4 years, not a visitor from the depths of space like Comet Borisov or the recently discovered megacomet Bernardinelli-Bernstein. Indeed, so typical does it seem it was once planned to be the target for the Rosetta mission, which ended up going to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko instead.

When it made one of the 10 closest approaches to Earth by a comet (around 12 million kilometers) in the last 70 years telescopes worldwide were trained on it. On previous passes, Wirtanen had been dubbed “hyperactive” because it seemed to shed material unusually fast. Results from the Keck telescope, using its NIRSPEC spectrograph upgraded just before the visit, have now been published in the Planetary Science Journal, including some eyebrow-raising features.

"46P/Wirtanen has one of the highest alcohol-to-aldehyde ratios measured in any comet to date," said Dr Neil Dello Russo of Johns Hopkins University in a statement."This tells us information about how carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen molecules were distributed in the early Solar System where Wirtanen formed."

That's not the only odd thing about Wirtanen they found. Comets are "dirty snowballs", icy balls of frozen gases, rocks, and dust. The heat of sunlight falling on a comet's nucleus as it passes the Sun heats the ice. In the absence of an atmosphere, the liquid phase is impossible, so once a particular type of ice melts it sublimates, going directly to a gas, producing a coma around the comet.

The coma is expected to cool down the further away it gets from the nucleus, just as air cools as it expands, but that barely happened for Wirtanen. “We found that the temperature measured for water gas in the coma did not decrease significantly with distance from the nucleus, which implies a heating mechanism," co-author Professor Erika Gibb of the University of Missouri-St Louis said.

The authors are not certain what was heating up the incredibly diffuse molecules within the coma, but offer two possibilities for further exploration. “There may be solid chunks of ice flying off 46P/Wirtanen. We've seen this in some comets visited by spacecraft,” Gibb said. We know Witanen underwent a spectacular explosion at the time. “Those ice chunks tumble away from the nucleus and sublimate [turn to gas], releasing energy further out into the coma.”

Alternatively, ionization of molecules in the coma by sunlight may release high-energy electrons that warm up other molecules when they collide with them.

Sadly for anyone hoping to make Wirtanen the ultimate space party destination, the alcohol detected was methanol not ethanol, so it would send you blind, and not in a good way. Other molecules detected in its coma include formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, so it is just as well they are millions of times too diffuse to do us any damage.

If a hot, drunk comet traveling around the inner Solar System and behaving erratically sounds alarming the good news is that Wirtanen never crosses Earth's orbit. Its closest approach to the Sun is 5 percent further out, and its elongated orbit takes it out as far as Jupiter.

SpaceX's first civilian crew will have 'one hell of a view' from the spaceship's toilet in a new glass dome

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

An illustration of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spaceship with a glass dome "cupola" at its nose. SpaceX


SpaceX could launch the world's first all-civilian crew into orbit as soon as September.

The Inspiration4 crew will have a glass dome, or "cupola," on their Crew Dragon spaceship.

That's where SpaceX's mysterious toilet is, according to mission commander Jared Isaacman.

SpaceX's first civilian crew is poised to enjoy what may be the best bathroom views in human history.

It's not clear how the toilet facilities work on SpaceX's Crew Dragon spaceship — the design is shrouded in proprietary secrecy. But we do know that the toilet is on the ceiling. That area of the spaceship will also feature a glass dome, called a cupola, that SpaceX is installing at the nose of the capsule.

So while passengers are using the toilet, they'll be able to gaze out the windows, according to Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and jet pilot who purchased four seats on SpaceX's spaceship for a civilian mission to space. The trip will be the first orbital spaceflight ever with no professional astronauts on board. It will also feature the first space toilet with a 360-degree view.

"It's not a ton of privacy. But you do have this kind of privacy curtain that cuts across the top of the spacecraft, so you can kind of separate yourself from everyone else," Isaacman, who will be commanding the mission, told Insider. "And that also happens to be where the glass cupola is. So, you know, when people do inevitably have to use the bathroom, they're going to have one hell of a view."

Isaacman's planned journey, a mission called Inspiration4, could launch as soon as September 15. The group is expected to orbit Earth at an altitude higher than the International Space Station (ISS) for three days, enjoying the views and conducting science experiments while they're there. Isaacman gave the other three Crew Dragon seats to physician-assistant Hayley Arceneaux, Air Force vet and engineer Chris Sembroski, and scientist and analogue astronaut Dr. Sian Proctor.

The Inspiration4 Crew at NASA's Launchpad 39A. From left to right: Chris Sembroski, Hayley Arceneaux, Dr. Sian Proctor, and Jared Isaacman. SpaceX/AP

Inspiration4 aims to kick off a new era of space tourism — alongside Jeff Bezos's plans to peek above the edge of space for three minutes on July 20 (though that's a suborbital flight), and a mission next year that aims to send three paying customers to the ISS aboard a Crew Dragon capsule.

SpaceX has flown professional astronauts to the space station for NASA three times, but none of those spaceships had a cupola. That's because the capsules' noses needed to dock to the ISS so that the astronauts could climb into the orbiting laboratory. Since the Inspiration4 crew won't be docking to anything, SpaceX is replacing the docking mechanism with a window that passengers can stand in.

The cupola is there to offer passengers stunning views of Earth. The toilet just happens to be nearby.

"Probably most 'in space' you could possibly feel by being in a glass dome," Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and chief engineer, said of the new cupola on Twitter.

The Inspiration4 crew is learning to use the spaceship's toilet

Jared Isaacman at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

SpaceX/Business Wire via AP Photo

Isaacman, a self-described "space geek," started the payment-processing company Shift4 when he was 16 years old. He is still the company's CEO. He also founded Draken International, which owns a large fleet of ex-military aircraft and trains Air Force and other pilots. Isaacman sold his majority stake in that company for "a nine-figure sum," according to Forbes, which estimates his net worth at $2.9 billion.

Isaacman flies jets in his free time and has circumnavigated the globe at least twice. When he learned that he could buy a Crew Dragon flight, he jumped at the chance. Though neither SpaceX nor Isaacman has said how much he paid, NASA has estimated such a flight might cost $55 million per seat.

As part of the Inspiration4 mission, Isaacman is working with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital to plan science experiments for the crew to do while in orbit. The four crew members also plan to draw each other's blood, take skin samples, and perform cognitive tests to help NASA gather data about how spaceflight affects the human body.

SpaceX and NASA have both declined to reveal details about the location or design of Crew Dragon's toilet, but the spaceship's prior passengers have offered clues.

The toilet "works very similar to the one we were used to in the Space Shuttle, and it worked very well. We had no issues with it," NASA astronaut Doug Hurley told reporters after launching to the ISS on the Crew Dragon's first crewed flight last year.

The toilets on the Space Shuttle and on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft involved rudimentary hose and bag systems, so it's likely the Crew Dragon's resembles those. For civilians like Isaacman and his crewmates, this might be an adjustment. Even NASA Astronaut Peggy Whitson previously told Business Insider that going to the bathroom might have been the worst part about life in space.

Learning to use the toilet is part of the intensive pre-flight training for Inspiration4, according to Isaacman.

"We're just gonna have to work through it," he said.

NOW WATCH: Everything SpaceX had to get right for Crew Dragon's Splashdown

US maker of electric motors free from rare earths raises $225 mln
Hyunjoo Jin

Jars containing rare earth minerals produced by Australia's Lynas Corp from its Mount Weld operations are seen near Laverton, northeast of Perth, Australia, August 23, 2019. REUTERS/Melanie Burton

BERKELEY, California, June 30 (Reuters) - Turntide Technologies, a U.S. startup that makes energy-efficient electric motors without rare earth metals, has raised $225 million, underlining growing investor appetite for climate technology startups.

Most automakers, including Tesla (TSLA.O), use rare earth-based magnets in electronic vehicle motors. But the raw materials are costly, can be environmentally-damaging to process and China dominates production, making Western companies nervous about price or supply shocks.

Ryan Morris, Turntide Chairman and CEO, told Reuters reliance on rare earth minerals exposed companies to "a huge risk".

"Demand for electric motors for vehicles is skyrocketing. The supply (for raw materials) is not increasing very quickly. I think you're going to have a boiling point reached in the next three to four years with the shortage of those materials," he said.

Turntide's electric motors are designed to efficiently circulate air in the buildings of Amazon (AMZN.O) and other customers. "The demand for better air quality has massively increased because of pandemics," Morris said.

The firm also makes motors for commercial vehicles made by Volkswagen’s (VOWG_p.DE) MAN division and for Aston Martin's supercars.

The company this month gained a foothold in the transport sector with its purchase of two U.K.-based firms - Hyperdrive and BorgWarner's engineering technical center business.

The latest funding, which includes investment from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, allowed it to close the acquisition, he said.

The investment brings the total funding to $400 million for the California-based company whose investors include funds backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr, Amazon and BMW (BMWG.DE).