Tomorrow, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, a Boeing-built spacecraft is set to blast off toward the International Space Station, carrying a human crew for the first time. The astronauts have been in preflight quarantine, getting some extra practice for the historic ride through flight simulations. The rocket stands tall on the launchpad, with the spacecraft, Starliner, perched on top. The weather forecast looks nearly perfect.

This might be more exciting if we hadn’t seen it all before. Boeing’s first crewed launch was originally supposed to happen three weeks ago. The astronauts donned new Boeing-blue spacesuits, said goodbye to their loved ones, and strapped into a capsule perched on a rocket humming with fuel. Then a valve on the rocket malfunctioned, and the launch was called off and rescheduled. Then engineers discovered a small helium leak within Starliner itself. While analyzing the leak, engineers stumbled upon a “design vulnerability” in the spacecraft’s propulsion system, further delaying the test flight. It’s surreal to imagine that this spacecraft might actually get off the ground tomorrow—not only because of the recent trouble, but because these problems are just the latest in a string of issues.

Even if Starliner flies tomorrow, Boeing’s track record with this kind of spaceflight has so far proved spotty at best. That’s concerning because actual people are getting into Starliner tomorrow to jet off to the ISS. But the company’s record also matters because every Boeing misstep leaves the United States ever more reliant on its rival company, SpaceX, and its CEO, Elon Musk, to transport its astronaut to space. Boeing doesn’t need to be the most groundbreaking or exciting American aerospace company to fulfill its duty to NASA. It merely needs to be a reliable transportation provider for America’s astronaut corps. And with this flight, it must prove that Starliner can simply work.

In 2011, after three decades of service, 135 missions, and two deadly disasters, America’s venerated fleet of space shuttles went into permanent retirement. But the country still needed a way to send its astronauts to the International Space Station, which demands constant staffing. So NASA turned to the private sector for help. It hired two companies—one young and inventive, the other established and staid—to develop new rides for its commuting spacefarers. SpaceX brought its first duo of astronauts to the ISS in the spring of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic. Since then, SpaceX has been consistently transporting four-person crews to the station, inside the company’s Dragon spacecraft and on its Falcon 9 rocket.

[Read: SpaceX’s riskiest business]

And Boeing … Well, last year, NASA’s second-in-command, Pam Melroy, told The Washington Post that Boeing’s inability to cross over into operational Starliner flights was "existential." In addition to the most recent round of software glitches and faulty hardware, Starliner has suffered repeated complications that have set it several years behind schedule. Boeing and SpaceX started out at roughly the same pace, both launching their respective new astronaut capsule to the ISS for the first time in 2019. But whereas SpaceX’s test went off without a hitch, Boeing’s was cut short. I still remember the eerie silence that settled over the press site at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, when officials realized that Starliner’s flight software had malfunctioned, and the spacecraft couldn’t reach the space station. Then, as Starliner made its way home, engineers discovered and fixed a software error that, if left uncorrected, could have resulted in a catastrophic failure.

Boeing didn’t complete a successful uncrewed mission until 2022, and has spent the past two years fixing still more issues. Every new space vehicle turns up problems for manufacturers to troubleshoot and iron out, and delays are common in the industry. But Boeing’s struggles have only compounded in recent weeks, when engineers made concerning discoveries about Starliner after NASA and Boeing officials had determined that the spacecraft was finally ready to fly.

Technicians have since replaced the wonky valve on the rocket, a frequently used vehicle from the manufacturer United Launch Alliance. Officials have decided not to plug the helium leak, determining that it doesn’t pose a safety hazard. An analysis of the propulsion system’s design vulnerability on Starliner determined that it could prevent the spacecraft from carrying out the maneuvers necessary to return to Earth, but only under rare circumstances. Engineers have also brainstormed several temporary solutions to the latter. Boeing officials said they’ll apply a permanent fix to later Starliner flights, but for now, the teams have decided the spacecraft is fine to launch as is.

At a press conference last week, Mark Nappi, the manager of Boeing’s commercial-spaceflight program, said that although his team had missed the design weakness, he wasn’t concerned about Boeing’s process for determining flight readiness. "Hardware issues or hardware failures are just part of our business," Nappi said. "They are going to occur as we do launch preps; they’re going to occur in flight." Uncovering anomalies is indeed a natural part of the spaceflight industry. But such reasoning might not sound reassuring to the public. (Earlier today, a Boeing spokesperson told me that the company has no additional comment on the latest issues and pointed to Nappi’s recent remarks.)

All of this drama is unfolding while Boeing is under intense scrutiny for other recent events: this year’s infamous panel-blowing-off-the-plane-mid-flight incident and two fatal crashes several years before that. The company’s air and space divisions are two separate entities, and air travel and spaceflight are, of course, enormously different experiences. Starliner staff has NASA personnel watching over their shoulders, especially after the space agency admitted in 2020 that its oversight had previously been "insufficient." But the departments are part of the same embattled company, which faces multiple government investigations and the loss of its CEO amid the ongoing safety crisis. With every delay and bad surprise, the space part of Boeing will have a harder time convincing the government and the public that it’s the more capable, responsible sibling.

[Jerry Useem: Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing]

Boeing is supposed to make six regular-service flights for NASA in the coming years. In so doing, it would help fulfill the agency’s desire to have more than one form of astronaut transportation in operation. NASA leaders have touted competition among contractors as a way to make spaceflight cheaper, but they also have more pressing motivators than cost. If SpaceX, the agency’s current sole provider, has to suddenly ground its spaceships, NASA would have to consider turning to Russia for rides again. This arrangement brought NASA through the post-shuttle years from 2011 to 2020, but some members of Congress have always resented the arrangement.

Now NASA has once again deemed Boeing ready to attempt a crewed Starliner flight, and is projecting a fairly calm attitude about Starliner’s latest round of problems. When asked whether NASA was concerned that the issues hadn’t been found sooner, leaders emphasized that the inaugural crewed mission is a test flight. In fact, all of the 135 flights the space shuttles made could be considered test flights, "because we learned something on every single one of those flights," Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, said at the press conference last week. More than half a century in, spaceflight remains a dangerous production. By informally labeling every mission a test flight, NASA risks diminishing the importance of accountability for problems that arise, especially in the aftermath of a harrowing or even deadly event.

Tomorrow’s launch, if it happens, will mark only the beginning of Boeing’s high-stakes demonstration. Starliner must deliver the astronauts assigned to it—the former military pilots Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams—to the space station, protect them during a fiery atmospheric reentry, and land them in the New Mexico desert. In a recent post about Wilmore and Williams on X, Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who flew on two shuttle missions, wrote, “We’ve never been totally ready for launch—just need to convince ourselves we’re ready enough.” Perhaps only someone who has flown to space can say the quiet part out loud.

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The yellow school bus has remained remarkably consistent over the past century. But as a smaller share of kids ride the bus, its role is shifting.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside the decision to kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani Trump’s assassination fantasy has a darker purpose. Mad Max’s George Miller is taking on the apocalypse (again).

A Mixed Legacy

Across county and state lines, school buses are remarkably consistent. The yolky exterior color, called National School Bus Glossy Yellow, has remained the go-to shade since 1939. Buses are outfitted with a pop-out stop sign and vinyl seats, which, in my memory, tend to be ripped up and held together with strips of duct tape. Riding the yellow school bus is a tradition shared by generations of American students—but that experience is less common now than in previous decades.

In 2022, only about a third of students rode the bus to school, down from roughly 37 percent five years before, according to a Washington Post analysis of the National Household Travel Survey. More students are getting dropped off by car or driving to class—a trend that accelerated after the coronavirus pandemic began, especially among the children of college-educated parents.

Many people are nostalgic about the school bus, but its legacy—and present—is mixed. The bus was once a transformative force in American education, enabling a switch from highly local, one-room schoolhouses, Antero Garcia, an education professor at Stanford University, told me. And in the years following Brown v. Board of Education, buses became a potent symbol of desegregation. But for many kids, the bus can be a place of stress. Students may face discipline from drivers (many of whom struggle with low pay and odd working hours) or bullying from peers. Garcia also noted that it can feel like a form of punishment for bus riders to spend hours commuting each day just to get the same educational opportunities as students who can be driven by parents.

The bus is a tool that touches millions of kids’ lives every day, but on the whole, these vehicles have hardly improved over decades—even as the education system flocks to other, new technologies. Its stagnation has come about in part because administrators tend to focus on interventions that improve test scores “rather than a dusty old bus,” Garcia said. He also noted that “there’s an assumption that school buses are for working-class kids, largely kids of color.” (According to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, 70 percent of students from low-income families ride the school bus, whereas a majority of students from non-low-income families are driven to school in a personal vehicle.)

For years, the school-bus system has struggled to recover from a severe bus-driver shortage: At the start of this past school year, there were about 192,000 drivers—a 15 percent decline from four years earlier. From 2009 to 2019, the number of bus drivers dropped by 22 percent; in that same period, the number of students enrolled in K–12 schools grew by some 1.4 million. Moreover, the school-bus system doesn’t serve all students—a 2020 study of New York City’s school-bus ridership found that Black and Hispanic K–6 students are more likely to attend schools where buses are unavailable.

Still, some school districts are making changes: Efforts to add electric buses to school fleets have gained momentum lately. Some well-meaning educators have tried taking advantage of bus time by giving students more homework—which, Garcia said, “is the last thing kids want.” He wonders if the bus could become a site of enrichment rather than tedium. What if the bus were an opportunity for peer mentoring, for example, or film classes?

The bus is a liminal site: Bus time is part of the school day, but it’s not class time. Students gather together, but they have less structure, and there’s less of a focus on academics. This freedom makes the bus worth looking at in full, as a meaningful, rich space for kids in America.

Related:

The agony of the school car line Walking to school is a costly option for some families.

Today’s News

The International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ top court, ruled that Israel must immediately stop its offensive in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. China continued its largest military drills in more than a year around Taiwan, days after Taiwan swore in a new president who openly supports sovereignty for the nation. This summer’s hurricane season could be among the worst in decades, meteorologists predict.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Two new literary works from Colombe Schneck and R. O. Kwon feature fascinating, flawed women, Maya Chung writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Adam Maida. Source: Getty.

Stop Shouting Down the Women Going Off the Pill

By Christine Emba

Perhaps you’ve noticed something new at your local market. Opill, the first oral contraceptive approved by the FDA for over-the-counter use, began shipping to U.S. stores in March. It has no age restrictions and does not require a physician’s sign-off; you can now buy a three-month supply at Walmart or Target the same way you might pick up Tylenol or tampons or a six-pack of seltzer.

This is, without a doubt, a momentous development in the realm of reproductive health … Yet Opill also debuts as more and more women, in public forums and in their physicians’ offices, are raising concerns about the effects of hormonal birth control on their physical and mental well-being—and are pushing back against the idea that pharmaceuticals are their best options for trying to prevent pregnancy.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

NASA

Admire. These photos of Earth from orbit, taken recently by the astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station.

Read. David Shoemaker’s new book, Wisecracks, is not about comedians or jokes. Instead, he aims to illuminate the ethics of “taking the piss.”

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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In the tropics, along the band of sky near the equator, clouds and wind run the show. These are juicy clouds that aggregate and disaggregate in agglomerations and that can live a long time, as far as clouds go. In the summer, when the ocean is especially hot, they can pile up high, breeding hurricanes; at all times of year, the behavior of tropical cloud systems drives global atmospheric circulation, helping determine the weather all over the world. And still, clouds remain one of the least understood—or least reliably predictable—factors in our climate models. “They are among the biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate change,” Da Yang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, told me.

Yang is a cloud expert—a cloud guy, really, drawn to their mysteries. He recently moved from California to Chicago, where he gets to see a lot more clouds on a daily basis. “I find clouds are beautiful to watch,” he said. “If I take an airplane, and I can see clouds down below or far away, I’m always fascinated by how rich the cloud organizations are. How they interact with each other …” He trailed off. Clouds are complex and ephemeral, which makes them difficult to fully understand. Yang listed for me key aspects of clouds for which we still lack comprehensive understanding: how they form, what determines their spatial scale, how long they can last. “Those sound like simple questions,” he said, “but they are actually at the forefront of the field.”

The cloud problem has persistently plagued climate models. Although these models do many jobs extraordinarily well—understanding the energy balance of the planet, describing a trajectory of warming from human-made greenhouse-gas pollution—they can’t seem to get clouds right. Models will sometimes produce cloud-related projections that are simply incorrect, and some models “run hot,” meaning they predict catastrophic warming, possibly because of cloud dynamics.

One major stumbling block is the resolution of climate models, or how finely or coarsely they represent the Earth; to represent individual clouds, which can be the size of a minivan or the state of Minnesota, would require models at a resolution finer than the current finest model. Climate modelers have recently begun to produce fine-scale models at the regional level, where they can zoom in on the individual details of clouds. But, Yang told me, stitching such snapshots together into a picture of the whole globe would exceed the capacity of the largest existing supercomputer.  

Even if computers did have the capacity to do these analyses, scientists would need more tools to understand the results. For that, Yang said, we need more cloud theory. “Without theoretical understanding, we would not be able to interpret the model results,” he told me. “Without these first-principal-based understandings, we don’t really know whether the model is accurate.”

Tiffany Shaw, a climate physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that some models are producing inaccurate visions of entire regions, possibly because of the cloud problem. For example, models predict more warming in the east Pacific than the west; the opposite is true in reality. Another example is the narrow belt of rainfall that rings the planet in the deep tropics and produces some of Earth’s strongest thunderstorms—and, as such, many clouds. Our planet generally has one such belt, but atmospheric-ocean climate models have been insisting for decades that it has two. This may, in part, be an issue of undercooked cloud modeling.

To Shaw, these irregularities are not a sign of something amiss; rather, they show the maturation of climate science. The field has gotten many of the big things right, and now it is learning to incorporate the smaller, more granular things into its vision of the world: things like clouds. Because of their complexity, Shaw is also excited about the possibility of using machine learning to understand them. “They’re data-hungry algorithms, and we have a lot of data,” she said.

[Read: Playing God with the atmosphere]

One big question haunts all cloud research: Scientists know that there’s a lot of uncertainty about how to predict future cloud dynamics, and that those dynamics will likely have some bearing on how climate change progresses. But how significant of a bearing? For now, initial indications point to reassuring conclusions rather than catastrophic ones. “What we’re learning is that not everything matters for climate change. Which is good!” Shaw told me. For example, losing shallow cumulus clouds as the ocean warms—which some computer models have suggested could happen—would have a destabilizing effect on the tropics, potentially provoking runaway warming. But, Shaw said, a recent observational study found that the clouds aren’t as sensitive to warming as the computer models thought; the feedback between heat and clouds does amplify global warming, but not to the extreme degree suggested.

[Read: America’s climate boomtowns are waiting]

One of the keys to reconciling modeling and reality is simply more observations. Chris Fairall, a research physicist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, has been studying clouds since the 1970s, when he worked on fog forecasting for the U.S. Navy, in highly foggy Monterey, California. “Fog is a cloud that sits on the ground. The Navy is very interested in fog, because they don’t want their ships running into things,” he told me. Fairall has seen the field of cloud science improve dramatically, in part thanks to efforts, including his own, to measure them. In 2020, he was the lead scientist on NOAA’s ATOMIC project, which flew one of the agency’s “Hurricane Hunter” planes and sent a ship to survey cumulus-cloud formations off the east coast of Barbados, as part of a larger joint cloud project with European researchers. Over the next few years, the data from those missions will help improve cloud models. Although Fairall likes studying relatively shallow cumulus clouds, he told me that the biggest cloud questions are about deep convective clouds, the ones that go all the way up into the troposphere, where they begin to develop complex ice, snow, hail, and supercooled water interactions. Cumulus clouds are complex enough; those deep clouds “have 100 times the complexity,” he said.

In his view, the U.S. is devoting a tremendous amount of effort to cloud research; it’s only up from here, in terms of cloud knowledge. NASA, NOAA, the Department of Energy, the Navy, and the Army all have researchers working on cloud problems, he said. Clouds envelop two-thirds of the Earth in their moist embrace, and in every moment help determine our collective physical reality. Surely the quest to understand them is among the most salient scientific endeavors of our time.

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft might possibly have its crewed test flight soon. NASA, which has been working with the company, said Thursday that it is expecting to be able to do the launch a little bit after noon, at 12:25 p.m., on Saturday, June 1. If that doesn’t work, further attempts might also be made on…

Read more...

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Amid the parade of outrages, what we’re feeling isn’t numbness. It’s more like airsickness.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s money problems are becoming a crisis for the entire country. Cows have almost certainly infected more than two people with bird flu. OpenAI should have gone way beyond Scarlett Johansson.

The Nation Shrugs

“At what other moment in American history,” Anne Applebaum recently asked, “could a presidential candidate praise a fictional serial killer, and inspire almost no reaction at all?”

Even by the standards of the times, what she was referring to did seem a vertigo-inducing moment. Amid an anti-migrant tirade at a rally earlier this month in New Jersey, Donald Trump gave a shout-out to the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter, referring to the fava bean–loving cannibal played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs as a “wonderful man.”

And the nation shrugged, because this was simply the latest in a long list of 2024’s bizarre and disorienting moments (including an earlier recent reference to cannibalism from the president himself). “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos argued recently, “that it can actually become numbing.”

But Americans’ reaction is less like numbness and more a response to something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. Motion sickness is caused by a discrepancy between what the inner ear detects and what the eye sees. The effect can be vertiginous—so the way people avoid being nauseated is by trying to ignore the dissonance.

We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.

More than a century ago, Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, described what he called “anomie,” a condition of instability “resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.” Anomie could result from a conflict of belief systems, leading to a breakdown of social ties and a “shared moral order.”

Call it anomie or call it airsickness—we find ourselves in a land of confusion. Trump pays off a porn star and yet is hailed as a champion of Christian values. He mocks prisoners of war and calls dead soldiers “suckers,” and his MAGA base is thrilled by his patriotism. And, as Tom Nichols notes in The Atlantic today, Trump brags about his tight relationship with America’s implacable adversary, Vladimir Putin, claiming that the Russian president will release detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich “for me, but not for anyone else.”

To hear conservative Christians argue that personal character doesn’t matter, or to witness self-described constitutional conservatives defend a relentless attack on the rule of law, is disorienting. To see advocates of law and order embrace rioters who attacked the Capitol and beat police officers is baffling. To watch the party of Ronald Reagan embracing isolationism and following Trump in truckling to the Butcher of Ukraine, Putin, is bewildering. Mind-bending, also, is that, despite Trump’s fire hose of lies, 71 percent of Republicans describe him as “honest and trustworthy.” Recent polls suggest that Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the swing states that will decide the November election.

Maybe that’s why following the news these days feels like swallowing crazy pills. You don’t have to be a particularly cynical observer of American politics to recognize that, past a certain point, no norms endure that cannot be abandoned, and that any position can be flipped if doing so is expedient.

Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse and defaming his victim. He incited a violent attack on the Capitol, called for terminating rules in the Constitution, dined with a neo-Nazi, and floated the idea of executing the nation’s most senior general. He has been fined for fraud on a massive scale, faces more than 80 felony charges, and is accused of withholding and sharing top-secret national-security documents.

Faced with all of this, the Republican Party says, Yeah, we want four more years of that. GOP leaders wearing red ties make lockstep pilgrimages to his felony trial in New York to show their fealty, while wannabe running mates mimic his rhetoric and echo his lies about the 2020 election. And now there’s Nikki Haley, who has called Trump “unhinged,” “toxic,” “diminished,” and unqualified. Yesterday, she said that she would vote for him anyway. The alleged frauds, adultery, sexual assault, threats, and possible felony convictions don’t matter. Close to half the electorate seems to agree.

Which brings us back to our chronic airsickness. Most of us took it for granted that Americans by and large shared certain ethical assumptions. Despite our differences, we imagined, we all used roughly the same moral compass to judge right and wrong.

But what if that’s not true anymore?

What if the guardrails of the U.S. legal system turn out to be illusory or broken beyond repair? What if we have exhausted our reservoirs of democratic values and shared norms? And what if the constant turbulence buffeting our sense of reality is a sign that we are in a different world, one whose values we don’t understand?

I suspect that the great thinker Hannah Arendt would recognize some of the aspects of that world. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she described the annihilation of truth and the collapse of moral reasoning:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.

Or, to paraphrase the immortal line of Bette Davis’s character, Margo Channing, in All About Eve: Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy year.

Related:

Trump claims he can free an American detainee—if he’s reelected. The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump

Today’s News

The Louisiana legislature passed a bill that would classify abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances. The legislation would make it a crime to possess the drugs without a prescription, punishable with jail time and fines. The Justice Department and 29 states filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster’s parent corporation, Live Nation, in an attempt to break up the company over its alleged monopoly in the live-entertainment industry. The Supreme Court ruled that Republicans in South Carolina did not engage in racial gerrymandering when they moved thousands of Black voters out of a congressional district that Republicans currently control. The decision allows the state to continue using its current congressional map.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Who was Michael Field? The pseudonym was an open secret, used by two women who composed subversive and arresting poems together, Walt Hunter writes. Work in Progress: Joe Biden’s new tariffs on Chinese goods mark the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that dominated American policy making for nearly half a century, Rogé Karma writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Scientists Are Very Worried About NASA’s Mars Plan

By Marina Koren

For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover’s belly.

Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth … Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard.

If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Warner Bros. Pictures

Watch. Furiosa (out now in theaters), a Max Mad prequel, is not Fury Road, Shirley Li writes. And that’s a good thing.

Read. Long Island, the Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s new novel and the sequel to his popular 2009 book, Brooklyn, asks the most American of questions about immigration, Rhian Sasseen writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Do we live in an unusual star system? Astronomers have been trying to figure out if the Solar System is unique compared to other stars and their orbiting planets, and they just took a major step towards answering the longstanding cosmic mystery.

Read more...

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Michael Cohen is an admitted liar and a convicted felon who is openly fueled by a thirst for revenge against Donald Trump. That he is so frank about his motives and past may actually make his testimony seem more credible to jurors.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The real meaning of Trump’s “unified Reich” post Reaganomics is on its last legs. The panic over smartphones doesn’t help teens.

Revenge of the Fixer

For the past week in New York, Michael Cohen has been a valuable—and fraught—star witness in Donald Trump’s criminal trial. The defense has tried to portray Cohen, Trump’s ex-lawyer and fixer, as a jilted lackey—which he openly is. To get a sense of his animus toward his ex-boss, look no further than his T-shirt depicting Trump behind bars, his admission in court that he once called Trump a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain,” and his two memoirs—Disloyal and Revenge—that trash the former president for his many transgressions.

Still, Cohen’s openness about his past and his motivations—in part forced by the public and criminal nature of his previous offenses—may actually make him seem more credible to a jury. His argument in court boiled down to: I committed crimes at Trump’s behest—and suffered consequences—because I would have done anything for him. That transparency made him appear like “the agent who was held accountable, whereas the principal has escaped accountability,” James Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email.

In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and violating campaign-finance laws by making hush-money payments—one of which went to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. He testified that, during the 2016 election, when she was considering publicizing the story of her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, Trump ordered Cohen to “take care of it.” In turn, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 of his own money, which he claimed was later reimbursed by Trump.

On the stand, Cohen largely remained calm, though he had some shaky moments. He admitted during cross-examination that he had stolen tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization, pocketing some of the money earmarked for a tech company. (When a prosecutor later probed him, he said that he had been angry because his bonus was cut.) The defense repeatedly tried to assail Cohen’s credibility—an obvious way to undermine a man who had previously lied under oath. Cohen testified that he had spoken with Trump in October 2016, via Trump’s bodyguard’s phone, about paying off Daniels. Attempting to ding Cohen on the details of the call, the defense insisted that Cohen hadn’t spoken with Trump and had actually discussed a different matter with the bodyguard, but Cohen stood by his testimony. Trump’s lawyers also called into question Cohen’s money-related stake in the trial. Cohen admitted that he has a financial interest in the outcome of the trial, because he writes and podcasts about Trump, but added that an acquittal would be better for him economically because it would give him “more to talk about.”

A common paradox lies at the heart of Trump’s criminal case, Sample told me: “To get at the truth in prosecuting criminal enterprises often requires relying on liars.” In most cases, being a convicted felon would make a witness far less credible. But the fact that Cohen has already served time in prison for admitting to crimes related to hush-money payments actually adds to his credibility as a witness here, Valerie Hans, a professor at Cornell Law School and an expert on juries, told me in an email; jurors won’t have to wonder if Cohen is testifying as part of a plea deal to avoid prison time for those charges.

In contrast to the prosecution’s parade of witnesses, Trump’s defense team presented only two witnesses before resting its case earlier today. (Trump himself did not testify.) One of the witnesses was Robert Costello, a lawyer who once did some legal work for Cohen. He was positioned to be a Cohen-antagonist, and he claimed that Cohen previously told him that Trump “knew nothing” about the hush-money payment to Daniels. But in the process of trying to impugn Cohen, Costello “succeeded in impugning himself,” Sample told me. The judge scolded Costello after he reportedly told the courtroom to “strike” something from the record and continued to speak after objections were sustained. “The circus-like debacle of Costello’s testimony is a microcosm of why the defense called so few witnesses,” Sample explained.

Cohen’s history of fealty to Trump, and his willingness to bully and lie, is well documented. That his past would be an asset may seem strange—but the prosecution is banking on him. After Memorial Day weekend, the jury will convene and begin their deliberations. Their decision to convict or acquit a former president will largely hinge on whether or not they think they can trust the word of Michael Cohen.

Related:

Michael Cohen, mediocre hero Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial

Today’s News

Trump’s defense rested its case in his New York criminal trial. Closing arguments are set to begin next week. Rudy Giuliani and 10 other Trump allies pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, forgery, and fraud charges in an Arizona criminal case related to their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. One man died and multiple passengers suffered injuries when a Boeing plane flying from London to Singapore encountered severe turbulence; the aircraft plummeted roughly 6,000 feet within the span of five minutes.

Evening Read

Illustration by Nick Little for The Atlantic

The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing

By Tyler Austin Harper

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”

When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself” …

What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food.

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Among the many absurd details of the hush-money case are the alliterative, somewhat zippy pseudonyms that Daniels and Cohen apparently used in a nondisclosure agreement. Trump went by “David Dennison,” and Daniels was called “Peggy Peterson.” Earlier in the trial, Keith Davidson, Daniels’s former lawyer, testified that he had come up with the monikers—and that David Dennison was the name of a real person on his high-school hockey team.

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In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover's belly.

Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission, known as MSR for short, is one of the boldest undertakings in NASA history, as consequential as it is complicated. The endeavor, which involves sending an extra spacecraft to the red planet to retrieve the samples, serves as a precursor to getting future astronauts home from Mars. It’s a test of whether the United States can keep up with China’s space program, which is scheduled to return its own Mars samples in the 2030s. It could uncover new information about our planetary neighbor’s history, and reveal a picture of the cosmic wilderness that was the early solar system. Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard.  

If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth. NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won't arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected. At a press conference last month, NASA chief Bill Nelson repeatedly called the state of the Mars Sample Return mission "unacceptable," a striking chastisement of his own agency, considering that MSR is an in-house effort. Officials have put out a call—to NASA’s own ranks and to private space companies—for “quicker and cheaper” plans that don’t require “huge technological leaps” to bring the samples home.

[Read: Scientists really, really want a piece of Mars]

NASA officials say that they remain committed to the return effort, but researchers—including the agency’s collaborators who work on the project—are concerned. “The path forward is not clear,” Aileen Yingst, a geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the Perseverance mission, told me. Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home. Last year, an independent review ordered by NASA ominously warned that “by abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the U.S. abandons the preeminent role that [President John F. Kennedy] ascribed to the scientific exploration of space.”

If and when the MSR tubes come home, their contents could dramatically shift our understanding of Mars. The first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars, in 1976, carried instruments designed to examine Martian soil for evidence of tiny, metabolizing life forms but didn’t find anything conclusive. Some bits of Martian rock, ejected by colliding asteroids, have made it to Earth as meteorites. (And scientists have tried to find proof of life in these, too). But such fragments arrive scorched by atmospheric reentry, their composition altered and contaminated from the journey. Pristine samples are far more tantalizing.

MSR would deliver Martian dirt straight from an area that scientists believe holds a promising chance at containing signs of life from 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover is exploring the shores of what scientists believe was once a lake, at a crater called Jezero, where the sedimentary rock may bear signs of a once-habitable world, or preserved life itself. The samples might also offer hints about Earth’s origin story. The rocks that existed here 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, have since been crushed, melted, and eroded away. But Mars, a world lacking plate tectonics and serious weather, still bears rocks from the time of its very formation.

[Read: The most overhyped planet in the galaxy]

The promise of such samples has been a top research priority for planetary scientists for over a decade. The original plan to do so, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is accordingly ambitious, involving several different spacecraft to retrieve the capsules, launch them into Martian orbit, and fly them back to Earth. No astronauts are involved, but Mars scientists have likened the mission choreography to the Apollo program in terms of complexity.

That plan was apparently destined to unravel from the start. NASA’s independent review found that MSR had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning" and was "organized under an unwieldy structure," with "unclear roles, accountability, and authority.” Technically ambitious missions always cost more, and MSR is arguably one of the most complicated that NASA has ever undertaken. But the scientists who help NASA set exploration priorities have no control over the budgets of the resulting programs—Congress does.

Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Two moons of Jupiter, Europa and Enceladus, are likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.

[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]

Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.

For scientists who support Mars exploration, MSR is a problem, siphoning funds away from other efforts to study it. “There’s so many aspects to studying a planet that do not involve analyzing small amounts of rocks in the lab,” says Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at Western University, in Canada, who’s working on an international mission to map the ice deposits on Mars’s polar regions. NASA pulled its financial support from that project in 2022, citing MSR’s cost as part of its motivation. Planetary scientists have recommended prioritizing a mission to drill deep into the ice at the Martian poles, far from Perseverance’s domain, where conditions could be just comfortable enough to support small life forms now.

NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned. Lindsay Hays, a program scientist at NASA’s planetary-science division, told me that NASA will seek input from the science community about which sample tubes to return. “NASA has a responsibility to use taxpayer funds in the most effective and efficient way possible,” she said. “But it’s also part of our mandate to the nation to do things that have never been done before.”

[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]

Most planetary scientists aren’t happy with a potentially scaled-back approach either. “You’ve decimated the science, because now you’re not going to get the diversity that you could have if we brought back the full suite of samples,” Phil Christensen, a geologist at Arizona State University who co-chaired the community’s latest decadal survey, told me.

A badly delayed sample-return mission would fracture NASA’s grand vision for its Martian future. By the 2040s, NASA intends to be focused not on the red planet’s soil, but on sending astronauts there and, crucially, bringing them back. That operation relies on having successfully practiced launching off from Mars, which NASA hasn’t yet managed with MSR. Instead, the agency is back at the drawing board, hoping to find a way out of an $11 billion pit. Officials expect to finish reviewing new proposals and come to a decision on the mission’s future in the fall. Meanwhile, Perseverance chugs along, excavating the mythical oasis of Jezero Crater with each curated tube.

NASA aims to set up a long-term human presence on the Moon, but maintaining a habitat on the surface will require some innovative infrastructure. To one day transport cargo across the dusty, cratered landscape, NASA is considering a magnetic levitation railway system.

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On September 29, 2022, NASA’s Juno spacecraft made its closest flyby of Europa, coming to within 220 miles (355 kilometers) of the Jovian moon’s frozen surface. The closeup view of Europa revealed incredible details of the moon’s chaotic terrain, which suggest that its icy crust is not where it used to be. The images…

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