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Harvard Professor Jonathan McDowell announces retirement and departure from America

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Jonathan McDowell is the go-to expert for all spaceflight. Thousands of subscribers read his monthly Space Reportand we’ve seen him explain unexpected events on orbit on cable news and other media platforms.

But it was always his side gig. For 37 years, Dr. McDowell was an X-ray astronomy expert at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Earlier this year, he announced that he would retire from the role and also leave the US for the UK.

The decision, he said, was complicated by policy changes that have been the first since President Trump took office due to continued pressure on the federal science budget.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s any more opportunity to be an effective scientist and an effective person building the scientific community,” Dr. McDowell said. “I’m just proud to be as American as I used to be.”

Born in the US and the UK to gain dual citizenship, Dr. McDowell joined the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 1988 and leads the Science Data Systems Group at NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the 26th space telescope.

In the next phase of his career, Dr. McDowell said he wanted to spend more time. Document what’s going on in space.

He’s preparing to move abroad, and with the accent he jokes, he’s clearly becoming British. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What is your interest in space?

There were really two routes. The satellites and space side really came from the Apollo program. I remember walking home from a school in the northern UK. I saw the moon in the sky and said, “Next week there will be humans there for the first time. They will be in another world.” It blew my 9-year-old mind.

The astronomical side was wondering what the real story was about where we came from and how the universe turned out to be. It pushed me towards an interest in cosmology at a very early age. My dad was a physicist and my babysitter was everything. I didn’t realize there were other options.

Another major influence was “Doctor Who.” I started watching it at the age of three. It infuses me with the wonders about the universe and the idea that one crazy person can help how humanity interacts with it.

All of them came together and I was just fascinated by what was there.

The UK school system specializes early. I’ve been doing orbital calculations since I was 14, and since I learned Russian, I was able to read what the Soyuz astronauts were doing. I have completed my PhD. At Cambridge University, I was able to spend time with people like current astronomer royals Stephen Hawking and Martin Reese. It wouldn’t have been a better training.

On the side, I used my technical skills to get deeper into spaceflight. At the time, the media didn’t actually cover the space, so I forced my own research.

Did that lead to the creation of Jonathan’s Space Report in 1989?

I just moved to Smithsonian Astrophysical ObservatoryIt was once the center of space information for the public in the 1950s. The civil servants began attacking me with questions they still get from the public, so in Self-Defense, they started preparing their briefings about what’s happening in space every week.

Someone has recommended that I put a briefing in Usenet, a kind of precursor to the web, but it doesn’t exist yet. To my surprise, it was popular. And I never looked back.

In the US, in particular, we saw it more internationally than most news sources. I gave it the same weight as what Russians, Chinese and Europeans did. It helped me gain a reputation and people in the space industry started sending me information.

Why did you keep your space report free?

Honestly, most of the work I do for myself anyway. I am the No. 1 reader. But I now have this role of being someone who trusts to say what’s going on. If I don’t receive direct money for it, I can maintain its reputation for independence and objectivity.

How have space flight and space exploration changed in your life?

I grew up in the 1960s during a superpower. It was the US, the Soviet Union and the Cold War. In the 1970s, space became more international. China, Japan, France and others have begun selling their own rockets and satellites. Then, in the 1990s, there was a shift towards commercialization in both communications and imaging. And then there was another change in the 2000s and 2010s that I call democratization. There, cheap satellites created space within the budgets of university sectors, developing countries, or start-up companies.

The most important thing in space in 2025 is not that there are more satellites, but more players. This has implications for governance and regulations.

Another way to think about how things have changed is where the frontier is. When I was a child, it was a low-earth orbit. The frontier is now close to the asteroid belt, with the moon and Mars becoming part of the accumulation of humanity. On the other hand, low-Earth orbits are so normalized that they are not necessary to deal with space agencies. Just call SpaceX.

How do you plan to spend your retirement?

The UK has been actively and actively working recently in promoting what we call space sustainability. They are committed to using the space, but they are responsible. I hope to be involved in those efforts.

Compile Large catalogue of Space Junk Around the sun that the US Space Force does not pursue. It’s not anyone’s job to track it right now. We will return years later, so we need to put together our actions for things that are farther, farther, what we send out between the planets. We think that when it’s really a rocket stage, it’s an asteroid that hits Earth.

Obviously, it all needs to be scanned and it will take me years. Somewhere, a reasonable commute from London, you will need to find a new home in the library. My plan is to make it available by appointing it when it is unpacked.

What motivates me to closely record human activity in space?

As an astronomer, I think it’s a measure for a long time. I imagine someone who wants to know that, a thousand years from now, perhaps more extraterrestrial times, has stepped into space for the first time at this important moment in history.

I would like to save this information so that they can reconstruct what we did. That’s who I write about. Not today’s audience, but a thousand years from now.

Source: www.nytimes.com

United Kingdom must accelerate adoption of electric cars to stay ahead of competitors

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This push for electric cars isn’t about a culture war. It’s a simple choice. Can we prepare British industry to take advantage of the changes that are coming? Or will we leave it alone to let our competitors run laps until we decide whether to change our tires? Or?

The previous government, including the current opposition leader, may have been content to play politics with people’s jobs at stake by delaying the end of sales of new gasoline and diesel cars. But this government is not like that.

Prior to that, we were on track to meet the 2030 deadline and the electric vehicle mandate had wide support from industry. More than two-thirds of UK car manufacturers had already committed to a full transition to electric cars by 2030, and investment was starting to pour into building electric cars here at home.

However, the decision to delay the transition has resulted in significant costs for companies that were already gearing up to meet the 2030 deadline, dealing a major blow to our credibility and putting investment, jobs, and growth at risk.

This Government has clearly recognized the fact that if we want the car industry to survive in the UK, we need to provide certainty and confidence to investors, not change our targets.

Having grown up in Sunderland, home to the Nissan factory, I know first-hand how important the car industry is to local communities in delivering growth, jobs, and wealth creation. The UK car industry employs over 150,000 people, and its continued success plays a major role in our mission to grow the economy.

If we get this transition right and support the growth of the UK electric vehicle market, we have a huge opportunity to tap into a multi-billion pound industry that can create well-paid jobs for decades to come.

That’s why in our manifesto we committed to moving back the transition to electric cars to 2030 and phasing out the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines.

But we want to work with industry and make sure that their voice is heard on how to get there. That’s why we’re fast-tracking a consultation to see how the government can support manufacturers, investors, and the industry as a whole to achieve our goals. To be clear, the content of this consultation is how do not have if We will achieve this ambition.

Working families also benefit from this transition. EVs are becoming more affordable and practical, prices are starting to fall, they are cheaper to run and maintain, range is improving, charging infrastructure is expanding rapidly, and demand in the UK is increasing. It is increasing.

And of course, with road traffic contributing up to 30% of air pollution, a shift to electric vehicles means cleaner, healthier air for our children and future generations.

Delaying the transition will only make it harder and more expensive for the industry and families in the long run. That’s why we want to do everything possible to ensure that the next generation of zero-emissions vehicles are designed and manufactured here in the UK, are affordable and accessible to workers, and encourage the uptake of electric vehicles. That’s what I think.

That’s why the Chancellor announced more than £2 billion will be spent on producing zero-emission cars. This funding will support the latest research and development of these technologies, accelerate commercial scale-up, and enable capital investment.

On the demand side, people involved in promoting electric vehicles are concerned about the availability of charging points. That’s why we’re investing over £200m to accelerate the rollout of charging points, building on the 71,000 public charging points already available.

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We are currently taking proactive steps to foster stability in this sector, but we are also developing long-term plans to ensure UK motor manufacturing can grow and thrive.

We are already seeing manufacturers embrace zero-emission vehicles and the transition to a greener economy, with governments fully supporting manufacturers. Jaguar Land Rover will move to a 100% fully electric vehicle range over the next five years, investing billions of dollars into the UK economy. At the same time, we can see Toyota investing heavily to make its UK manufacturing operations 100% carbon neutral by 2030.


When governments say decarbonization must not mean deindustrialization, we mean it. There is no path to net zero without the support of British industry and workers.

With Ford recently announcing job cuts across Europe and Stellantis proposing to close Vauxhall’s Luton factory, we’ve learned more about the global challenges facing the industry and how we’re working to help. We have no doubts about the need to play a role.

That’s exactly why I’ve been sitting around the table talking directly with industry leaders about how best to make this transition happen, and my message has always been loud and clear. The Government is listening and we will work closely with you to deliver our plans.

The bottom line is: Either we look ahead and leverage the clean energy transition to deliver growth, creating new jobs and a greener future, or we fall behind. is. This government will not make the same mistakes as the past and will not tolerate it.

Jonathan Reynolds is Secretary of State for Business and Trade.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Featuring a Real Jetpack: Todd Howard and Jonathan Nolan Discuss Fallout Games

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IIf you were to ask director Jonathan Nolan what his favorite movie of the year was from the late 2000s, he would most likely name a video game instead. “I started playing Pong years ago with my brother Chris because I grew up watching the whole history of the medium, and the storytelling, the tone, the things that we were doing in the game had this level of audacity. That’s when I started,” he says. “That's what I felt [2008’s] Fallout 3: Audacity. Frankly, I didn't feel that way in the film and television industry at the time. ”

Director Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show, will be sitting next to video game director Todd Howard, who led the development of Fallout 3 and 4, and will be attending a number of premieres for the first series. Two episodes told to me before time. It's clear within minutes that Nolan understands the game almost as well as Todd. He says he's drawn to games where your options are open, where you decide for yourself who you want to be, and where your decisions affect the world around you – games like Todd Howard's . The two meet like old friends, are comfortable around each other, and are passionate about each other's work.

A scene from Amazon Prime's Fallout. Photo: Amazon Prime

“I talked to a lot of people about making a Fallout movie or TV show, and I kept saying no to everyone,” Howard says. “I loved the work that Jonah did in film and television, and in some of the interviews he did, he mentioned his love for the game…I told someone he was perfect. I said, ‘Can someone help me?’ We met and luckily hit it off. I found out he was very familiar with Fallout.”

That conference took place in 2019. At the time, there was no precedent for a proper video game animation, despite many ill-fated attempts over the years. (We're in a different place now; the curse of video game movies is broken, and there are now plenty of TV and movie adaptations.) Todd also envisioned Fallout as a movie. There wasn't, he says. “My take in 2019 was that it’s hard to translate games because a lot of games are about specific characters you play. But for me, it’s the world of Fallout, the characters…the people always wanted to condense Fallout 3 and 4 into a two-hour experience, and I always felt that way too. But high-end television can tell a long story.”

The first two Fallout games punished '90s computer RPGs with a dark sense of humor and a strong anti-nuclear message. As the show's writer Graham Wagner points out, they could have been written by: adbusters. Over 200 years after the first bomb was dropped, he emerges from an underground vault as a survivor of a nuclear war and quickly realizes that life above ground is short, cruel, and dangerous.

Jonathan Nolan attends the world premiere of “Fallout'' in Hollywood. Photo: Tommaso Boddi/GA/The Hollywood Reporter/Getty Images

When Bethesda revived the series in 2008 with Fallout 3, it brought a bit more hope and lightness to its wasteland, maintaining its retro-futuristic aesthetic and dark humor while still offering its biting satire, punishment for nature. , toned down some of the overt anti-American rhetoric. Military expansionist message. Fallout 3 and 4 have a lot of emotional stories, but they also have a lot of mini Nucruncher weapons and comic violence.

The show leans into this vibe. Unlike HBO's The Last of Us, this isn't a self-indulgently serious look at a post-apocalyptic world. Featuring cowboy mutants, terrifying wildlife, toxic vault dwellers, a malfunctioning jetpack, and plenty of jokes. be many of Goa. Like the game where you cheerfully scavenge while turning on the radio, it can turn into a life-or-death battle with super mutants in a matter of seconds, and the series changes its tone from comedy to horror from moment to moment. . . One scene shows the horrifying moment a nuclear war breaks out, while another sees a slapstick battle with an irradiated bear.

The show plays with different aspects of Fallout's personality quite cleverly by splitting the perspective between three characters. Lucy is a Vault-dwelling genius with a tough personality that makes her the most suitable replacement for the player. Her behavior when she leaves the vault is very similar to my behavior in the game. She approaches people to greet them, peeks into abandoned buildings to find something useful, and inadvertently gets caught up in escalating fights. And pranks.

Ella Purnell (Lucy) in Fallout on Amazon Prime. Photo: Prime Video (via AP)

That wavering tone is a challenge for filmmakers, but it's exactly what Nolan loved about the game. “It was a world and a tone! I had never experienced anything like that. [mix of] Darkness and emotion – the politics of it are so delicious and fun and it feels alive and important… There are all these weird pockets of a previous world that has escaped the apocalypse and metastasized into something else, but with elements of comedy There is also. I had never really worked on it in my career. ”

“I think that was the hardest thing they had to do, to weave it onto the screen in a way that you would be there.” do not have I’m in control,” Howard said. “When you play the game, you Please be the director. ”

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I've always viewed the world of Fallout as somewhat nihilistic. Most video games, especially the post-apocalyptic ones, offer some degree of hope for saving or restoring the world. You have a reason to be a hero. But in Fallout's wasteland, the world is already broken, so you might as well do what you want. Nowhere is this more evident than in Obsidian's Fallout New Vegas (2010), with its faded but still glittering city of vice and morally ambiguous story.

But Nolan sees it the other way around. “Look at the great Cormac McCarthy and The Lord. It's a fucking black hole. No light leaks out of that story. Nobody's going to make it. On the other hand, one of my favorite things about Fallout It feels like the beginning of a thousand new worlds, not the end of the world.”

Todd Howard at the world premiere of Fallout. Photo: Leon Bennett/Getty Images

Ironically for a TV show based on a video game, the Fallout series has very few CG effects. Everything from gore to retro-futuristic aesthetics was achieved with practical effects. Howard says it was amazing to step into the world of Fallout that the television production team had created in real life. “I thought there would be more movie magic because we were going to do a set, but they literally just built a multi-level vault,” he laughed. “They were obsessed with everything. I went into the superintendent's office and sat down at the desk and there was a pile of papers and someone had written a note. Then I turned it over and it was about the power in the safe. There was a report. There was also a real jet pack!”

“At that point I almost lost the support of the producers,” Nolan interjects wistfully. “I just thought it would happen. Better If only I had a real jetpack. ”

Source: www.theguardian.com