First Private Spacewalk

Have space suit, will travel. On Thursday morning, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of payments company Shift4 Payments, took the first commercial space walk as part of the Polaris Dawn mission, in collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He looked extremely cool doing it. 

That’s not just because everyone looks cool in space. Isaacman took the spacewalk in an Extravehicular Activity Suit, a brand new space suit developed over the last two and a half years by SpaceX as part of a project to create the sort of comparatively low-cost space suits that could one day be worn by humans on missions to other planets. 

A typical NASA space suit costs between $15 and 22 million, according to Popular Mechanics, and NASA has spent more than $600 million developing suits over the years. These aren’t exactly quick-to-make, mass-market products. 

Humans aren’t going to colonize the moon or Mars with what amounts to high-priced custom couture. With the new suits, SpaceX’s long-term goal is essentially to transform the space suit business into something resembling fast fashion. 

“Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require millions of space suits,” reads a caption on a SpaceX YouTube video showing off the new suits earlier this year. “The development of this suit and the execution of the spacewalk will be important steps toward a scalable design for space suits on future long-duration missions as life becomes multiplanetary.” 

Isaacman echoed the idea. “We need space suits,” he told CNN. “And, you know, they shouldn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We need tens of thousands of them someday.” 

The new suits boast fancy features and materials, providing what the company says is “greater mobility, a state-of-the-art helmet heads-up display (HUD) and camera, new thermal management textiles, and materials borrowed” from the company’s rocket capsule program. 

Importantly, they also look awesome. 

You might think this is a silly observation. And fans of strictly utilitarian clothing may not care.

But Musk seems to understand that making space travel look chic and exciting is important for generating the enthusiasm, and the will, to make risky, expensive space travel ventures happen. Engineering is obviously important—especially when your suit is the only thing protecting you from the icy vacuum of outer space—but so is marketing. 

If you’re going to hang out in the great cosmic void, why not look cool doing it? Space fashion: It’s truly the final frontier. 

The AI chatbots are solving math problems now. Speaking of new frontiers, OpenAI, which makes the ChatGPT AI, released yet another version of its large language model yesterday. And unlike your old Barbie doll, this one can do math. 

Up until now, GPT-style AI tools have tended to struggle even with fairly straightforward math problems. 

Sure, ChatGPT could write you a college-level essay on Dante. (Here’s the opener it just gave me: “Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is not just a journey through the afterlife; it’s a journey through the human soul, revealing the eternal consequences of our earthly actions.” Better get an A for that one.) 

But calculus? Well, that was another story. As an English major, this is by far the most relatable thing about ChatGPT.

The new model, named OpenAI o1, was designed to be good at reasoning through complex, multi-step tasks and problems, including acrostics and difficult medical diagnoses. 

That might mean somewhat slower responses: ChatGPT typically responds to a query instantly, but OpenAI says the new model “thinks before it answers,” and thus “can produce a long internal chain of thought before responding to the user.”

Up until now, in other words, LLMs have been motormouths. But the new model is the pensive type. 

It’s always the quiet ones you have to worry about. 

New York City Cops. Last week, federal agents seized the phone of New York City Police Commissioner Edward Caban. Yesterday, Caban resigned from his position, on the request of Mayor Eric Adams. 

“The news around recent developments has created a distraction for our department, and I am unwilling to let my attention be on anything other than our important work, or the safety of the men and women of the NYPD,” Caban said.

Seems like kind of a, ahem…cop out? 

Tom Donlon, a former FBI official, will replace him on an interim basis. 

We still don’t know exactly what Caban is being investigated for, but according to the New York Post, “the probe centers around sweeping corruption and influence peddling.”

So far, Caban hasn’t been charged with anything, but it sounds like maaaaaaybe someone needs to spend time mulling over Dante and the eternal consequences of their earthly actions. 

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Scenes from a Washington, D.C., cocktail bar: Silver Lyan, one of Washington, D.C.’s most innovative cocktail bars, recently unveiled a new menu devoted to taboos. There are high-science concoctions inspired by cannibalism and, uh, John Fetterman’s cargo shorts, as well as a very complicated drink called “Banned in Boston” that references, among other things, early Progressive abstinence movements. Long live the new flesh? Well, maybe not. David Cronenberg fans shouldn’t get too excited just yet. Silver Lyan mastermind Ryan Chetiyawardana told Washingtonian, “We’re not serving anything related to human flesh at all.” Talk about not having any skin in the game.

QUICK HITS

• The FCC chair was not amused by former President Donald Trump’s predictable but terrible suggestion that ABC’s broadcast license should be revoked because of biased debate moderation. 
• Relatedly, Trump says he won’t debate Vice President Kamala Harris again. 
• Inflation cooled over the summer. But that doesn’t mean prices are down. A Fox Business analysis finds that prices are up more than 20 percent since August 2020. 
• Trump wants to exempt overtime pay from taxes.
• If you think inflation data gives a hint as to the winner of the election, you can bet on it. Election betting is legal, rules a federal judge. 
• Elsewhere in the courts: A North Dakota judge ruled the state’s abortion ban is illegal. 
• More than 30,000 Boeing workers are set to go on strike.
• Russia expels U.K. diplomats, accusing them of spying, as Russian leader Vladimir Putin warns the West over missiles.
• Sorry, physical media fans: Sony’s new PS5 Pro won’t have a disc drive. How are you going to play your 4k Blu-rays? (Oh, that’s right, you’re normal, so you probably don’t have any 4k Blu-rays…)
• It continues to be very funny, and very frustrating, that the Department of Justice antitrust suit against Google, which is focused on search, is happening at almost the exact moment that Google’s search dominance is threatened by AI tools like ChatGPT. 

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Source: https://reason.com/2024/09/13/first-private-spacewalk/