Small investors are flocking to high-flying growth stocks after the brokerage industry made trading free.

In the months since major brokers cut fees to zero, names like Tesla and Virgin Galactic have seen double-digit moves and become fan-favorites favorites for retail traders.

Wells Fargo analyst Christopher Harvey said the “seeds” for the recent moves in Tesla and Virgin Galactic were first planted in October when online brokers started slashing fees.

“This newly-found confidence and risk appetite among retail investors does not seem like a great signal to us,” Harvey said in a note to clients Friday. “It has been somewhat of a contra-indicator and mainly tells us that the great equity run is mostly behind us not in front of us.”

In October, Charles Schwab stopped charging trading fees for U.S. stocks, exchange traded funds and options. It previously charged $4.95 per trade. Rival firms TD Ameritrade, Interactive Brokers, E-Trade and Fidelity all took the same step in slashing commissions. Start-up Robinhood, which said in December it has 10 million users, first made inroads in the brokerage world by offering free trades.

Shares of Tesla are up more than 170% in the past three months, while Virgin Galactic is up more than 390%. The S&P 500 is up 8% in the same time period.

Overall, retail activity is up significantly in the past two months. Daily active revenue trades — a metric used by the brokerage industry before trading was free — have jumped more than 30% at the major brokers and are up “significantly” since the move to zero, according to Richard Repetto, principal at Sandler O’Neill + Partners.

Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade and E-Trade have seen a more than 30% increase month over month in so-called DARTs, according to data from Piper Sandler.

Fidelity told CNBC this week that that Virgin Galactic was bought more than any other stock earlier this week — topping Apple, Tesla and others. Fintech company SoFi said this week saw “by far the largest purchase day ever for the stock” on its platform. It was also the most-traded stock on SoFi overall. “Trading activity on [Virgin Galactic is] up 7x this year compared to 2019,” SoFi told CNBC.

Firms have also been lowering the barrier for entry by offering the option to trade fractions of a share. For as little as a dollar, investors can buy names like Amazon which closed above $2,000 per share Friday. SoFi began offering fractional trading in July. Charles Schwab, Square and Robinhood have since announced the same “fractional trading” feature.

SoFi said there have been a record number of traders buying expensive stocks in fractions of a share. In February, SoFi saw the most users buying a Tesla “stock bit” of a security in the platform’s history.

The personal data of approximately 10.6 million consumers who stayed at MGM resorts appeared online this week, ranging from home addresses and contact information to driver’s licenses and passport numbers in some cases.

The data, which was obtained during a July 2019 leak, was published on a hacking forum on Monday and verified by ZDNet and Under the Breach, a soon-to-launch data breach monitoring service. The file contained personal details including full names, birthdates, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers. For about 1,300 individuals, more sensitive data such as driver’s licenses, passports or military ID cards, was found online.

It’s not surprising that a hotel company was involved in a data breach, says Emily Wilson, vice president of research at the digital risk protection provider Terbium Labs. “The hospitality industry sits on a hotbed of valuable data that meets at a critical intersection of personal details, financial information and physical safety – travel data, companions and patterns of behavior.”

This is not the first time a hotel chain has been involved in a data breach. In 2018, Marriott hotels reported a data hack involving 300 million people who stayed at Starwood hotels.

Unfortunately, there may not be a lot individuals can do to completely protect themselves in response. “Breaches like the one impacting MGM are often difficult for consumers to respond to,” Daniel Smith, head of security research at Radware, tells CNBC Make It. There’s no “easy fix,” he says.

“In the MGM event, the only information you could change would be your phone number and email address,” he says, noting victims are unlikely to sell their house because their address was exposed.

Beyond monitoring your accounts, here’s a rundown of the steps you can take in response to this latest data breach.

To freeze or not to freeze your credit?

In many data breaches, experts recommend that consumers put a freeze on their credit reports to stop anyone from taking out a credit card or loan in their name.

Yet in the case of the MGM data breach, a credit freeze may not be a comprehensive solution, since the data set contained no financial information, NBC News confirmed. 

“A credit freeze doesn’t do much for identity theft,” says cybersecurity expert Joseph Steinberg. “Everybody comes [to these breaches] with the assumption that there’s something to do, and the reality is, sometimes, there isn’t anything a consumer needs to do.”

The biggest threat is not that a criminal could open a credit card in your name and make fraudulent transactions; that could be fixed quickly since credit card companies know about the problem, Steinberg says. In fact, the Fair Credit Billing Act makes it so consumers are only liable for up to $50 in fraudulent charges. And major credit card companies, including American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa, offer “zero liability” policies, so you don’t have to pay for any fraud. That’s why many experts recommend that you use credit cards instead of debit cards.

“If someone got a driver’s license in your name, that’s a lot more of a serious problem for you,” Steinberg says, noting that identity theft can be difficult for victims to unwind.

That said, credit freezes are still a crucial piece of consumer safety for both financial data and personal information, Wilson says. It pays to have one in place since so many data breaches do involve financial data. “If consumers haven’t already frozen their credit in the wake of breaches like Equifax, this breach is a timely reminder that it’s the most powerful resource at their disposal,” she says.

If you want to freeze your credit reports and haven’t already done so, you need to contact the three major credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, separately. Keep in mind that you will need to unfreeze your credit if you’re applying for any credit products in the future, like a personal loan, credit card or mortgage.

Beyond freezing your credit, here are five ways that you can protect yourself if your information was involved in the MGM data breach.

1. Change your passwords

The MGM data released this week was part of a previously reported leak. The company notified customers last August after it “discovered unauthorized access to a cloud server that contained a limited amount of information for certain previous guests of MGM Resort,” according to a statement to CNBC Make It. MGM did not disclose which locations were affected.

Since the breach, MGM tells CNBC Make It that the company has “strengthened and enhanced the security of our network to prevent this from happening again.”

Go back through your emails to check to see if you’ve been affected or contact MGM. Even if you’re not sure if your information was involved, it’s a good idea to change any passwords associated with your MGM Resort bookings, as well as any bank or credit card accounts used to make reservations. In fact, you should always be changing your passwords regularly.

Almost half of Americans, 47%, use the same passwords over and over again, according to PCI Pal. This can cause problems in a data breach: Only one account may be compromised, but if you’ve used that same password in several places, you’ll need to change all of them. Look into using a password manager such as LastPass or Dashlane. These programs will automatically generate unique, secure passwords for all your accounts and remember them for you.

2. If you don’t already have it, set up credit monitoring

Consumers should check their credit report on a regular basis. Unlike a simple credit score, your entire credit report provides a comprehensive look at your credit history and activity. You can get a free copy of your report once a year from each of the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and Transunion.

You can also set up a free monitoring service through sites like Credit Karma, which will send you alert emails about any recent activity on your TransUnion or Equifax credit reports.

In addition to setting up your own monitoring, you may also be eligible for free credit monitoring if you were affected by the massive Yahoo data breaches. The company has entered into $117.5 million settlement that offers this service to those affected.

Consumers should also use a service like haveibeenpwned.com to track if and when their data is leaked, says Jerry Gamblin, principal security engineer at Kenna Security. Roughly eight out of 10 emails released as part of the MGM data breach were already in the haveibeenpwned databases from other hacks.

3. Practice good cybersecurity habits

To protect your data year-round, experts recommend that consumers practice common safeguards, such as avoiding clicking on links or opening attachments in emails, especially when you don’t know the sender.

Emails are a particularly common way for fraudsters to gain access to your credit card information or identity. Hackers send what’s called a phishing email. “Email is the No. 1 way cybercrime of all forms happens. If a bad guy can get you to click on a link in an email, he can do all manner of bad things to your online life,” says Dave Baggett, co-founder and CEO of anti-phishing start-up Inky.

Consumers should use two-factor authentication to log into their accounts, which generally requires users to not only enter a password, but also confirm their identity by logging onto their phone or entering a code texted or emailed to them.

4. Keep a record of your response

Last year, there were 1,473 data breaches reported, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. That’s a 17% increase from the total number of breaches reported in 2018.

Each one of those hacks could lead to class-action lawsuits and investigations by regulators, like in the case of Equifax. While not all data breaches will result in a settlement, it’s good to be prepared. Consumers should take breach notifications seriously and document what they do in response, Charity Lacey, VP of communications at ITRC, tells CNBC Make It.

The Identity Theft Center’s ID Theft Help app has a case log manager tool that can help you track any actions you take in response to a breach.

5. Stay alert

It can’t be stressed enough: The best response is to be vigilant, Steinberg says. There are some pieces of information that don’t typically change, such as Social Security numbers and your home address. Because of their static nature, they become more valuable over time, Steinberg says.

If you’re concerned with exposure, you may want to consider creating and using different email addresses for traveling purposes, Smith says. The same applies for the phone number you provide. “Isolating your primary information from unnecessary exposure is the key takeaway,” he says.

Pay particular attention to emails and monitor your accounts closely when you travel. “Victims of the MGM hack need to be prepared to be targeted by phishing emails using the breach or their stay as a lure,” Smith says.

Sprint and T-Mobile have agreed to amend their merger deal agreement to give Deutsche Telekom a higher ownership stake in the new combined company, the companies announced Thursday.

Common shareholders won’t see a change in the exchange ratio, which is 9.75 Sprint shares for 1 T-Mobile share. SoftBank, which owns the more than 80% of Sprint, will see an exchange ratio of 11 Sprint shares for each T-Mobile share, the companies said. SoftBank agreed to surrender about 48.8 million T-Mobile shares it will gain in the merger after the transaction is complete. SoftBank and Deutsche Telekom will hold 24% and 43% of shares in the newly combined company, respectively, according to the announcement.

T-Mobile said Thursday it plans to close the merger by April 1. Sprint shares were up more than 4% after hours following the announcement. T-Mobile shares were down 1.5%.

Deutsche Telekom, the majority owner of T-Mobile, and SoftBank didn’t want to amend the common shareholder exchange ratio because a change would require a new shareholder vote which would add months to the deal’s closing, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. The two companies have already waited nearly two years for the transaction’s approval after state attorneys general sued to block the deal.

SoftBank agreed to give Deutsche Telekom a slightly higher ownership stake after Sprint’s financials have eroded during the long deal approval process, the people said. If the merged company’s stock hits $150 between 2022 and 2025 SoftBank can get its original percentage of shares back, according to Thursday’s announcement.

A U.S. district judge ruled in favor of the $26 billion merger between Sprint and T-Mobile last week. New York Attorney General Letitia James, who helped lead a lawsuit from a group of state attorneys general against the merger, said on Sunday she would no appeal the decision. The merger still can’t close until the California Public Utilities Commission approves the transaction.

Tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice cores from Greenland suggest we’ve been seriously overestimating the natural cycle of methane, while vastly undervaluing our own terrible impact.

Methane is an ‘invisible climate menace’ – roughly 30 times more potent as a heat-trapper than carbon dioxide – and while some of this atmospheric gas is produced naturally, new research indicates humans are responsible for far more of it than we thought until now.

Before the industrial revolution, when humans began to extract and burn fossil fuels on the regular, natural methane emissions were an order of magnitude smaller than current estimates, the study suggests.

Today, this means our own methane emissions might be up to 40 percent higher than suspected.

“Our results imply that anthropogenic methane emissions now account for about 30 percent of the global methane source and for nearly half of [all] anthropogenic emissions… ” the authors write.

Over the past three centuries, methane emissions have shot up by roughly 150 percent, but because this atmospheric gas is also produced naturally, it’s been difficult to tell exactly where the emissions are coming from.

To figure out the scope of our own impact from coal, oil and natural gas, it’s therefore necessary to know how much methane comes from wetlands and other natural sinks.

“As a scientific community we’ve been struggling to understand exactly how much methane we as humans are emitting into the atmosphere,” says Vasilii Petrenko, a geochemist from the University of Rochester.

“We know that the fossil fuel component is one of our biggest component emissions, but it has been challenging to pin that down because in today’s atmosphere, the natural and anthropogenic components of the fossil emissions look the same, isotopically.”

There is one rare radioactive isotope however, known as carbon-14, which is contained in biological methane and not in fossil fuel methane.

By drilling and collecting ice cores in Greenland, Petrenko and his colleagues were able to use this isotope as a sort of time capsule for past atmospheres, ranging from roughly 1750 to 2013.

Until about 1870, the findings suggest very low levels of methane were emitted into the atmosphere and almost all of it was biological in nature. Only after this date was there a sharp increase in methane, coinciding with an increase in fossil fuel use.

In practice this means that each year, the scientific community has been underestimating methane emissions from humans by as little as 25 percent and as high as 40 percent. And while that might sound entirely grim, the authors see a silver lining on the edge of this dark cloud.

“I don’t want to get too hopeless on this because my data does have a positive implication: most of the methane emissions are anthropogenic, so we have more control,” says University of Rochester geochemist Benjamin Hmiel.

“If we can reduce our emissions, it’s going to have more of an impact.”

Compared to carbon dioxide, methane is short-lived in the atmosphere, so stricter regulations could have a sizeable impact on future greenhouse gas emissions.

And, at least in the United States, there’s plenty of room for improvement in that respect. A study in 2018, for example, found methane emissions from oil and natural gas were 60 percent higher than those reported by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

This missing chunk could be part of the reason why we are currently underestimating methane emissions so much. It seems that what we are reporting on the ground is not matching up with what’s going on in the sky.

The study was published in Nature.

Delta Airlines had the most on-time arrivals in the last months of 2019 compared to other U.S. major airlines, according to a Wednesday report.

U.S. airlines with the highest rates of on-time arrivals between December and January of 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation include:

• Delta (84 percent)
• Alaska (81.3 percent)
• Southwest (80.2 percent)
• Spirit (79.5 percent)
• Allegiant (78.7 percent)
• American (77.4 percent)
• United (75.2 percent)
• JetBlue (73.5 percent)
• Frontier (73.1 percent)

While Spirit ranked fourth among major airlines for on-time flights, Consumer Reports ranked the newcomer airline known for its ultra-low-cost flights the “worst airline in America” in a 2018 report based on flights that took place between 2016 and 2017. The airline received a score of 62 points out of 100, followed by Frontier, which received a total of 63 points.

Southwest, Alaska and JetBlue, by comparison, all ranked within the top three best airlines in the U.S., according to the Consumer Reports study.

Delta is the second-biggest airline in the world and in the U.S., falling just behind American Airlines. United, Southwest and Alaska also made the top-20 list of the world’s largest airlines, Business Insider reported in March, citing research from air-travel data firm OAG.

Hawaiian Airlines Network had the best overall on-time performance at 87.6 percent, but the smaller airline and its partners fly out of 22 airports compared to the 223 airports where passengers can catch flights with Delta and its partners.

The Mediterranean diet, a popular eating protocol often recommended by health authorities, is the subject of a new study that evaluated its effects on cognition and aging. The results were promising — it turns out that eating this particular diet leads to important gut bacteria changes, reducing one’s risk of developing many health problems. The findings are particularly good news for the elderly.

The Mediterranean diet has been the subject of many studies over the years; it is known as a heart-healthy diet, but the benefits may extend beyond reducing one’s risk of developing heart disease. According to a new study recently published in Gut, the changes to gut bacteria that result from this diet may promote healthy aging and reduce the risk of various diseases like cancer and diabetes.

The study involved data on the gut microbiome of 612 elderly people from various European nations. Around half of these people were put on a Mediterranean diet for one year, whereas the remaining participants ate their usual diets for the same year. After the 12 months were over, the study found that participants who ate the Mediterranean diet had more bacterial diversity in their gut compared to the other participants.

As well, the diet reduced the production of inflammatory markers that may cause harm, including interleukin-17. At the same time, these dieters were found to have experienced the growth of gut bacteria associated with brain function and memory. The benefits continued from there, with the team also finding that some gut microbiome changes were linked to slowed frailty, potentially helping elderly people maintain their independence for longer periods of time.

The findings join a large body of research highlighting the Mediterranean diet’s many potential health benefits, which include everything from healthier BMIs to stronger bones, lowered cholesterol, decreased risk of diabetes, improvements to depression, and more. The American Heart Association maintains a site dedicated to the diet, including recipes and facts.

We imagine new Bed Bath & Beyond CEO Mark Tritton hasn’t gotten much sleep since he assumed the top spot at the struggling home furnishings retailer about 100 days ago.

“I am actually sleeping, and I am prioritizing that to make sure I am fresh and focused. It’s really important to build your resilience in these times, especially when I am drinking from a firehose and laying the foundation and making some big critical decisions about how we stabilize and grow our business,” Tritton told Yahoo Finance Tuesday evening in one of his first interviews since taking over. “I am staying resilient and focused, and using every tool in my toolkit.”

Certainly one can’t blame Tritton if sleep is the last thing on his mind at the moment.

Tritton has been non-stop at Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) pretty much since walking in the door after a successful stint in the C-suite at discounter Target. Tritton is credited by many on Wall Street as helping to craft Target’s successful turnaround plan, working hand in glove with current chairman CEO Brian Cornell.

Tritton’s first big move at Bed Bath & Beyond was to part ways with six long-time executives in one press release. It’s the type of house cleaning this former retail stock analyst has never seen before, but reflective of the years of poor execution in stores and online at Bed Bath & Beyond (and plunging stock price).

“When I came in there was very congealed thinking, there was no agility and no action. There were some real burning platforms that needed to be addressed,” Tritton explained, referring to the headline-grabbing leadership shakeup.

While deciding on who to keep in the C-suite, Tritton was also evaluating the company’s portfolio of assets with an eye on divesting non-core operations to raise cash to support a turnaround. For years, Wall Street has wondered why Bed Bath & Beyond operated a highly seasonal business such as Christmas Tree Shops. A portfolio evaluation is a hard gig for any retailer, but especially one like Bed Bath & Beyond that lists only two executives on the investor relations page — Tritton and CFO Robyn D’Elia.

Tritton told Yahoo Finance he has been relying on consultants Bed Bath & Beyond hired before his arrival to assess the business and some strong employees that had been at the company. Goldman Sachs has been tapped to shop non-strategic assets, Tritton said.

Tritton said he is nearing the end of his executive search and plans to make announcements in the coming weeks.

The lack of an executive team hasn’t stopped Tritton from starting to take some shareholder-friendly action.

A few strategic moves

Tritton orchestrated a sale leaseback transaction on January 6 with Oak Street Real Estate Capital for 2.1 million square feet of commercial real estate. The deal netted Bed Bath & Beyond $250 million.

And then today, Tritton returned with some more positive news. Bed Bath & Beyond said earlier it sold PersonalizationMall.com to 1-800 Flowers for a cool $250 million. Considering most on Wall Street had never even heard of this asset, the $250 million was a nice win.

After the market close, Tritton revealed a $1 billion capital return program. For 2020, Bed Bath & Beyond expects $600 million in total spending on share repurchases, dividends and debt reduction. Another $350 million to $400 million will be set aside for capital expenditures, or investments in technology projects and supply chain improvements.

That’s not to say Tritton has been the bearer of bad news early in his tenure. Wall Street has given Tritton a pass by and large as subpar sales reflect the lack of action by now ousted executives. But it has still been tough on the eyes.

On January 8, Bed Bath & Beyond revealed a challenging third quarter.

Come February 11, Bed Bath & Beyond’s stock plunged 25% on the disclosure that the holiday shopping season was far worse than feared. The period marked the ninth straight quarter of same-store sales declines. Wall Street fretted a turnaround under Tritton would take longer than expected.

“Shares could remain range-bound over the next few months as investors balance announcements of strategic actions with a continued deterioration in fundamentals and limited visibility,” wrote Jefferies analyst Jonathan Matuszewski in a note to clients. He rates the stock a Hold with an $11 price target.

All in all, a heck of a four-month stretch for Tritton.

“We are hungry for change,” Tritton said. Bed Bath & Beyond shareholders would echo that.

Nike, with a new CEO at the helm, announced leadership changes Tuesday that include a new chief operating officer and chief financial officer.

Andy Campion, the current executive vice president and CFO, will replace Eric Sprunk as COO, effective April 1, the company said in a statement, adding that Sprunk will depart Nike.

The company said Matthew Friend, its current CFO of operating segments and vice president of investor relations, will become its new CFO.

Nike stock rose less than 1% after hours on the news. Nike has a market value of nearly $159 billion, and its stock has gained more than 19% over the past year.

In October, Nike announced John Donahoe, a Nike board member and former CEO of eBay, would replace its longtime CEO Mark Parker, effective Jan. 13. Parker, who was named executive chairman, said at the time of the announcement that he would be “partnering closely with John and the management team.”

As part of the announcements Tuesday, Heidi O’Neill, president of Nike Direct, will become president of consumer and marketplace on April 1. She succeeds Elliott Hill, who will leave Nike, the company said. Nike did not say when Hill and Sprunk will depart the company.

“Heidi and Andy’s leadership has been instrumental in both evolving and driving Nike’s strategy over the last decade,” John Donahoe, president and CEO of Nike said, in a press release. “In their new roles, we will see them have even greater impact on Nike’s success in the future. Matthew brings more than 10 years of Nike experience to the CFO role and will be a great addition to our executive leadership team.”

The leadership changes come as Nike faces mounting scrutiny over allegations of doping as well as gender discrimination. In October, Parker said an interview with CNBC’s Wilfred Frost that Donahoe should “enable this next level of growth,” digitally, for the company.

He also said the decision was not prompted by doping allegations connected to Nike’s Oregon Project, the elite training group run by Nike’s head running coach Alberto Salazar.

At the end of September, Salazar was banned amid doping allegations, which reportedly included ties back to Parker himself. The New York Times reviewed emails from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that showed Parker had been briefed on Salazar’s various experiments to use testosterone cream for track-and-field athletes.

In an email to employees at the time, Parker said: “Nike did not participate in any effort to systematically dope any runners ever; the very idea makes me sick.” He also said Nike looked into the allegations against Salazar and found no violations.

In 2018, Nike President Trevor Edwards, who many saw as Parker’s likely successor, retired after complaints surfaced at the company in March 2018, when a group of women presented Parker with a survey on gender discrimination. Edwards was blamed in the lawsuit for creating and exacerbating a “hostile work environment.” Parker responded by restructuring his leadership team, which included ousting Edwards.

Nike in 2018 admitted it failed in hiring and promoting women, and the company ousted at least 11 executives and announced raises for 7,000 employees after conducting an internal review of its pay practices. Parker apologized to employees at large in May.

SpaceX is planning to send up to four private citizens into space to take a trip around Earth sometime at the end of 2021 or in early 2022. The spaceflight company announced an agreement on Tuesday with Space Adventures, a space tourism business that has helped seven different private citizens take trips to (and from) the International Space Station aboard Russia’s Soyuz rocket and spacecraft.

Space Adventures said the price of the mission will not be disclosed, and the two companies were light on other details, like what kind of preparation the tourists will have to go through. The companies did say Tuesday that the tourists will fly in the human-rated version of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and that they will orbit Earth at two to three times the roughly 250-mile height of the ISS.

SpaceX has spent the last few years building and testing out this new version of Dragon as part of a contract with NASA to shuttle astronauts to and from the ISS, after years of using the spacecraft to shuttle cargo to the space station. The private spaceflight company recently completed the second major flight test of the Crew Dragon, as it’s called, which demonstrated the capsule’s ability to escape an exploding rocket.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has teased the idea of space tourism as a business for a few years now, though he’s been overly optimistic about how soon that could happen. The company announced in early 2017 that it had accepted undisclosed payments from two customers for a trip around the Moon using Crew Dragon and the Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX said at the time that the trip would happen by the end of 2018. But in September 2018, the company announced that it now intends to send one of those passengers — Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — around the Moon using the company’s massive, yet-to-be-built Big Falcon Rocket. (It’s still unclear what happened to the second customer.)

SpaceX has similarly had to delay the first Crew Dragon flight with NASA astronauts as it worked through the process of certifying the spacecraft with NASA. That flight is now supposed to take place later this year.

Other private spaceflight companies are vying to establish the space tourism market. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are in the running, though both of those companies are promising far briefer experiences. Virgin Galactic says it plans to send its first space tourists up later this year where they will experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the company’s plane-like spaceship. Blue Origin is promising customers a similar amount of time in space, though in a spacecraft that’s more similar to SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. (Both of those tickets cost in the neighborhood of $200,000 a pop.)

While little is known about the newly-announced flight, SpaceX has detailed the inside of the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will ferry the tourists around the Earth. The capsule’s interior is a minimalist affair, with just a few suspended seats and an array of touchscreens. The spacecraft is ringed with windows, though they’re not as large as the ones Blue Origin built into its own capsule. SpaceX has also shown off sleek, custom-designed spacesuits and helmets that Crew Dragon passengers will wear. The suits are less bulky-looking than past designs, but are still pressurized, cooled, and flame resistant. They come with touchscreen compatible gloves, and will lock into the seats for the ride up to space.

On Monday, the French trainmaker said it has signed an agreement to acquire Bombardier’s rail business for between €5.8 billion ($6.3 billion) and €6.2 billion ($6.7 billion).

The acquisition, which will be paid for via a mix of cash and shares, will improve Alstom’s “global reach” and its ability to respond to the growing demand for “sustainable mobility,” particularly in Europe, according to a company statement.

Alstom and Bombardier, which is seeking to reduce its debt burden as it nears the end of a five-year turnaround, had earlier confirmed the talks following a report from the Wall Street Journal.

The Canadian company said the deal would enable it to focus exclusively on its aviation business.

The deal will be Alstom’s second attempt to create a European rail company that can compete with the likes of China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC), the world’s largest supplier of rail equipment.

A deal between Alstom and Bombardier could create the “European champion” the bloc needs to compete in the worldwide rail industry, said Maria Leenen, CEO of SCI Verkehr, a strategy consultancy focused on the railway and logistics industry.

Last year, EU regulators blocked a deal to combine the train manufacturing businesses of Alstom and its German rival Siemens on concerns that the merger would lead to higher prices for signaling systems and next generation high-speed trains.

The proposal drew comparisons to Airbus, which traces its roots to the consolidation of several European aircraft manufacturers in the 1970s, a structure that helps it compete with U.S. rival Boeing. The rail companies had argued that joining forces was necessary to cope with “growing competition from non-EU companies.”

CRRC is a key rival. The state-owned rail company reported revenue of nearly €21 billion ($23 billion) in 2018, compared to a combined €15.3 billion ($16.6 billion) recorded by Alstom and Bombardier’s rail unit, according to SCI Verkehr.

The Chinese company has been very open about its plans to export more railway products and has already underbid rivals to supply passenger rail cars in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.

It gained an important foothold in Europe last year when it bought German rail company Vossloh’s diesel locomotives business. German authorities are still reviewing the deal.

Leenen said that while China’s presence in Europe is for now “too small to count,” CRRC is pushing into the continent with the political backing of the Chinese state.

Trouble ahead?

Leenen warned the proposed deal between Alstom and Bombardier could also run into trouble with competition authorities, given that together the companies deliver almost 50% of Europe’s regional electric passenger trains.

SCI Verkehr expects to see growing demand for these trains in the next five to 10 years as Europe pushes to reduce its fleet of carbon-emitting cars.

Unions might also be concerned that the merger could lead to plant closures and job cuts, she added.

Other problems may lurk.

“I expect Alstom to factor in the risk of under investment in the plants, low-margin contracts and potential third-party claims” against Bombardier Transportation, Leenen said, referring to Deutsche Bahn’s reported refusal to accept 25 new intercity trains because of “technical defects.”

“Alstom is committed to recover Bombardier Transportation’s full operational and profitability potential,” the company said in a statement. It said that it expects the acquisition to deliver cost savings and boost earnings.