“We wanted to symbolize that both parties are the oppressor,” said a 25-year-old protester who wished not to be identified, fearing government reprisal. “We’ve all experienced firsthand that police violence is police violence regardless (of which political party holds power). … It doesn’t make a difference to the person being beaten.”
“For White people, maybe they feel there’s time to let the administration work, but for Black and Indigenous people who have had a rope around their neck, there is no time,” the protester said. “There’s no justice, so there is no peace.”
Biden in his inaugural speech Wednesday called for racial justice and unity in America, acknowledging the nation has been deeply divided by systemic racism and political forces. He denounced White supremacy and domestic terrorism and said the country must be healed.
“A cry for racial justice, some 400 years in the making, moves us,” Biden said. “The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.”
Still, protesters wearing all black clothing and gas masks took to the streets Thursday in Portland, where social justice demonstrations have endured for months. Protesters there a day earlier had vandalized the state Democratic Party headquarters and a federal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, building, police said, and four people have been charged in connection with those events.
CNN witnessed more arrests on Thursday night, when most people attending a protest at the ICE building were White. Indeed, the demographic of Portland’s protest movement has often been criticized. Protesters say it should be neither surprising, given that the city is 77% White, nor disparaged.
“I want to dispel that White anarchists are co-opting this for their own gain,” said the 25-year-old protester, who is White and told CNN he’s lived in Portland for most of his life. “There are Black and Indigenous people out there that can’t have the same outward action as White people can.”
‘It doesn’t matter who’s president’
Some protesters’ anger is fueled by their assumption the Biden administration won’t take up their key demands: abolishing ICE and defunding the police, a concept that can range from reinvesting police resources in marginalized communities to disbanding forces altogether, they told CNN.
“There is a lot of anger and rage” over social inequity among Americans, protester Alix Powell told CNN. And vandalism is how some people express their anger, she said.
“There’s a lot of hopelessness in people my age and people I know who feel like no matter how you vote, no matter what you do, they’re not listening,” she said Thursday. “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
“It doesn’t matter who’s president: Black lives don’t matter, Arab lives don’t matter, they don’t care about us. They just don’t,” another protester of Arab descent, who also wished to remain anonymous, told CNN on Thursday.
National Black leaders are counting on the new President to unify the county and enact policies that address the disparities Black people face in housing, education, jobs, health care and voter suppression, they have said. They also want Biden to undo the harm caused by President Donald’s Trump offensive rhetoric toward people of color and refusal to address police brutality in the Black community.
Among the first three executive orders Biden signed on Inauguration Day was one meant to ensure racial equality and support underserved communities. Biden also has assembled the most racially diverse presidential Cabinet in US history. His Department of Homeland Security has paused deportations for 100 days, with some exceptions. And on Friday, he’s set to sign executive orders that expand aid to low-income Americans.
Portland’s many months of protests
As in cities across the country, protests erupted in Portland late last spring over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and expanded to include demands for police accountability and prosecutorial reform in the cases of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain and other Black victims.
The events have ranged from peaceful Black Lives Matter marches to violent demonstrations including arson and vandalism. Some have become a target for hate groups seeking to antagonize those who come out to defend the rights of marginalized communities.
Oregon’s complicated racial tensions trace to the time of the nation’s founding. As late as 1854, the Oregon Constitution was amended with exclusionary language to keep Black people out of the state, according to a timeline published by Portland city officials.
The 14th Amendment, giving citizenship to Black people, passed there in 1868, two years after Congress approved it.
But it wasn’t until the 1950s that Oregon began peeling back laws and rules that propped up racial discrimination in housing, schools and employment.
CNN’s Andy Rose, Dakin Andone and Hollie Silverman contributed to this report.
SpaceX has bought two huge oil rigs to convert into floating spaceports for its Mars-bound Starship spacecraft. Named Phobos and Deimos, after the two Martian moons, SpaceX intends the massive structures to support super heavy lift launches.
Thanks to recently captured photos, now we get to see the enormous scale of the two rigs.
Shrouded in mist off the port of Pascagoula, Mississippi, Phobos stands out like a sore thumb. The derrick, the tower of steel meant to hold the rig’s drilling apparatus, towers above its surroundings — almost as if a Starship was already perched on the platform ready for liftoff.
SpaceX’s Starship offshore platform, Phobos, has entered the Port of Pascagoula in Mississippi. pic.twitter.com/IKjiPSJR4F
— Brady Kenniston (@TheFavoritist) January 22, 2021
As spotted by aerospace and launch photographer Jack Beyer, the two platforms were even given nameplates in line with their new names.
I’ve been exploring around the Port of Brownsville while waiting for Starship testing and found an oil rig that appears to be named Deimos, after one of the moons of Mars! Based on job postings and @elonmusk’s tweets, I’m willing to bet that SpaceX is involved. @NASASpaceflight pic.twitter.com/zhTOGNnZKd
— Jack Beyer (@thejackbeyer) January 19, 2021
Floating Spaceports
Converting oil rigs as means to launch its spacecraft has been part of SpaceX’s plans for a while.
“SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, Moon and hypersonic travel around Earth,” CEO Elon Musk wrote in a June 2020 tweet.
It’s still unclear when SpaceX will end up starting work on converting the two rigs. But if its recent development of its Starship spacecraft is anything to go by, we should expect to see some modifications being made to the oil rigs sooner than later.
More on the platforms: SpaceX Bought Two Huge Oil Rigs to Use as Floating Launchpads
Artist’s impression of an Artemis mission to the Moon. Image: NASA
Despite the ongoing pandemic, there’s much to be excited about in space this year. NASA’s Perseverance rover is less than a month away from landing on Mars; the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on Halloween; and the Space Launch System—NASA’s most powerful rocket ever—could see its inaugural launch later this year. And of course, there’s the Artemis program, which is supposed to deliver a woman and man to the lunar surface in just three years.
We will learn much in the coming weeks and months about President Biden’s NASA policy and what his administration believes is the best path forward for the American space program. In the meantime, we reached out to space experts, asking a very simple question: What should be Biden’s NASA priorities?
John Mogsdon, a professor or political science and international affairs from the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: “I think it is important for President Biden and his administration to early on indicate a commitment to sustaining a human space exploration effort, with a return to the Moon as its first objective. The details of the current Artemis plan are likely to change, but it is well past time for the United States to once again be sending humans to distant destinations.”
Indeed, NASA is full-steam-ahead on the upcoming Artemis missions. The space agency originally planned for a lunar landing in 2028, but the Trump administration bumped that to 2024. It’s widely suspected that Biden will return NASA to its original timeline, but we can only speculate at this point.
Howard McCurdy, a professor of public affairs in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C., hopes that Biden keeps his eye on this prize—and other prizes to come. “His main space priority should be establishing a lunar/Mars exploration plan that lasts more than five years—also determining the future of the Boeing Starliner, launching the [James] Webb space telescope, and cementing the fate of the International Space Station,” said McCurdy. “He will have many science priorities, but NASA is not near the top of the list.”
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The whole Boeing Starliner thing is certainly worth a think, as this project—a spacecraft for delivering astronauts to the ISS—has been beset by problems and delays. The first crewed test of this system still appears to be a way’s off.
At the same time, SpaceX has delivered in the form the CrewDragon spacecraft, which successfully transported NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the ISS last year. McCurdy also brings up a good point about Mars, as the Artemis Moon program is a skipping stone for the first human journey to the Red Planet, which could happen in the 2030s.
Jessica West, a program officer at Project Ploughshares and the managing editor of its Space Security Index, had this to say: “The future of the Artemis program is essential. NASA’s international partners are going to want assurances and clarity on the scope of the U.S. commitment and timeline. Cooperation is key, both to succeed at space exploration and to ensure that our planet and humanity share in the benefits. This starts with diplomacy. NASA has drafted the Artemis Accords as a tool for the development of norms for space exploration. But it’s not clear how or if it will work with the wider international community to turn this into a more inclusive process, at a time when other states also have lunar ambitions.”
“The Biden Administration should also be sensitive to the effects that the Space Force–and it’s rhetorical emphasis on warfighting and domination–have on NASA and the global perceptions of it’s lunar ambitions,” West added.
West raises a very good point about the Artemis Accords. Humanity’s tendrils into space are growing longer and more numerous with each passing year, making things more complicated from a geopolitical perspective. It would be good to get buy-in from the international community on such matters, which may prove difficult with countries like Russia and China.
Peter Singer, a strategist at New America and author of Ghost Fleet and Burn-In, also chimed in about Space Force, the newest branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. “Trump created Space Command, mostly for the reason he saw it as an applause line at his rallies,” he said. “So how does NASA and this new military organization co-exist over the long term? They will need to work together when it makes sense, but to also ensure that we don’t risk the actual, or just appearance, of militarization of space in our civilian activities.”
Ah yes—the ongoing threat that we might militarize space. That’s tricky one, particularly as the U.S. tries to keep pace with its aggressive adversaries and as Space Force works to achieve “spacepower” in this prospective warfighting domain.
Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas, recommended the following: “The National Space Council—an organization that focuses and reports out on various national activities with regards to space, both in government, academia, and industry—should be allowed to continue under Biden. NASA has a footprint in the National Space Council, and that should be allowed to continue.”
Jah added: “There should be a dedicated emphasis in space safety and sustainability, including as it relates to space traffic management. In 2018, Trump signed Space Policy Directive-3 [which focused on space traffic management]. The former administration called on the Office of Space Commerce to take the lead role—and I’m good with that. As for NASA’s role, it should provide input and oversight to the government regarding the science and technology needs of space traffic management.”
Space traffic management will most certainly be an issue moving forward. As it stands, the rules surrounding what goes into space, and how much of it, are fairly loose. As of January 20, SpaceX has over 1,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, with plans to add thousands more. That satellites might crash into each other, creating large and dangerous clouds of debris, is a possibility that increases with each successive satellite added to low Earth orbit. We need someone to play traffic cop up there, as well as someone to take out the trash.
Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission and professor at the University of Arizona, hopes that the Biden Administration will maintain or increase funding for the NASA Science Mission Directorate. “This Directorate performs essential research to monitor and predict the effects of climate change, explore the Solar System, and survey the Universe,” he said. “Budgets over the past four years have been favorable, and this is one area of the U.S. federal government where science activities remain healthy. The amazing achievements of NASA science programs serve as shining examples of what we can do as a nation when we unite and focus on a common vision.”
Well said. It would be sad to squander all the good things NASA has going at the moment, including satellites to help us predict bad space weather and weather on Earth, surveys to monitor melting glaciers, and spacecraft careering into the Sun and interstellar space. And, per Lauretta’s interests, grabbing surface samples from a nearby asteroid.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had plenty of sensible advice for President Biden: “NASA is the one part of the U.S. government that is not burning down right now, so don’t mess with (for the most part) success. What the human spaceflight program needs most is for the political leadership not to pull another 180, so continue Artemis despite its flaws, but remove the unrealistic 2024 deadline and appoint leaders who are not afraid to hold Boeing to account.”
McDowell also recommended firming up a plan for the end of the International Space Station, which has now been in orbit for more than 22 years and is showing its age. “Keep ISS going for a few more years to reap the investment made on CrewDragon and Starliner, but decide on the shutdown plan.”
“On the robotic/science side, fund it fully—supporting the climate science satellites and the education work the previous Administration tried to cut, get the Webb telescope into space and working, and let the science community pick the priorities going forward,” McDowell said. “Above all, don’t misuse the science program as a justification for the human space stuff—for example by forcing an emphasis on lunar-related science to provide a spurious justification for Artemis, which is the sort of thing that’s been done in the past.”
We also heard from Avi Loeb, an astronomy professor at Harvard University, whose recommendations were both philosophical and practical. “Given the wide interest in space exploration from the public, the scientific community and the commercial sector, it is essential to establish a new, bold vision that will maintain the leadership of the U.S. in space,” Loeb said. “This goes well beyond national security interests and relates back to JFK’s vision from 1962, the year I was born. The public is eager for inspiring initiatives, and space offers an ideal backdrop for an exciting vision that would advance our nation’s technological superiority. The importance of such a vision also builds on the immediate needs to add satellites that will allow better control of our effect on the climate and improve internet connectivity across the globe.”
Here, here. Space investment is often considered superfluous or indulgent, particularly as we face no shortage of problems on the surface. The challenge for Biden will be in achieving a fine balance—one that meets our needs here on Earth, while continuing to fulfill the legacy and potential of the American space program.
Some of the Bitcoin community’s most prominent voices (and also Facebook subsidiary Novi) are now hosting the Bitcoin white paper.
The move follows legal threats from nChain Chief Scientist Craig Wright levied against the nonprofit that has long hosted crypto’s foundational document.
“Yesterday both Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org received allegations of copyright infringement of the Bitcoin whitepaper by lawyers representing Craig Steven Wright,” the nonprofit wrote Thursday morning.
(Bitcoin was created by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, who has yet to be conclusively identified; Wright has repeatedly made claims that he is Satoshi.)
Seemingly in response to the takedown notice, a wave of crypto firms have published the white paper on their websites. As of press time they include:
Others are likely to join in.
The document has been uploaded to Arweave, a distributed platform for “permanent” file storage. It is also being stored on the “uncensorable web” via the InterPlanetary File System (IFPS) and the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
Bitcoincore.org appears to have taken down its copy of the Bitcoin white paper. The PDF is still live, however, on Bitcoin.org.
