British Airways just set a new record for subsonic flight — with some help from nature. The airline has confirmed Flightradar24 data showing that one of its Boeing 747s completed a New York to London flight in just 4 hours and 56 minutes, handily beating the previous best of 5 hours and 13 minutes set by Norwegian in 2018. A typical version of this flight takes 6 hours and 13 minutes, Flightradar24 said. The aircraft was helped by a stronger-than-usual (200MPH-plus) jet stream that took the 747 up to 825MPH — technically faster than the speed of sound, but not supersonic as the winds would have prevented the aircraft from breaking the sound barrier.

This wasn’t even the only potential record-setter. Virgin Atlantic had two flights that came close, one arriving just a minute later while another was three minutes behind. The airline even took potshots at British Airways on Twitter, claiming that it came close with half as many engines (on an Airbus A350-1000) and half the fuel.

This won’t come close to beating the absolute speed record. That honor still goes to a British Airways Concorde that completed the flight to London in just under 2 hours and 53 minutes, reaching speeds as high as 1,350MPH on its 1996 journey. The 747’s trip is still an achievement, though, and this might be one of the quickest passenger flights you see until (and unless) supersonic airliners return to the skies.

Northrop Grumman aborted the launch of a commercial Cygnus cargo ship to the International Space Station Sunday (Feb. 9) due to a sensor issue at the mission’s Virginia launchpad.

The Cygnus spacecraft, filled with NASA supplies, was set to launch atop an Antares rocket — also built by Northrop Grumman — at 5:44 p.m. EST (2244 GMT) from Pad-0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport here at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. But minutes before that liftoff, Northrop Grumman called of the launch try due to “off-nominal readings from a ground support sensor,” the company said in a statement.

NASA and Northrop Grumman are now targeting the launch for no earlier than Thursday, Feb. 13, at 4:05 p.m. EST (2105 GMT), weather permitting. There were launch opportunities on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but Northrop Grumman opted to skip them “due to an unfavorable weather forecast over the next two days, and time required to address the ground support issue,” the company said.

The Cygnus spacecraft is packed with 7,600 lbs. (3,400 kilograms) of supplies for the three-person Expedition 62 crew living and working on the space station. The launch had a five-minute window and was aborted more than two minutes into that allotment. Northrop Grumman is still evaluating when to try again.

During the lead-up to launch, flight controllers paused the countdown at the T-5 minute mark for reasons that were not announced. The Northrop Grumman team then resumed the countdown, then pushed launch from an initial 5:39 p.m. EST target to its final 5:44 p.m. EST time — the end of the window — before scrubbing the launch try altogether. During live audio launch commentary, a mission team member referred to a regulator while discussing the abort, but more details were not yet available.

The technical glitch marred an otherwise flawless countdown for Northrop Grumman’s Antares and Cygnus vehicles. The launch had a 95% chance of good weather and that forecast appeared to be spot on.

Aside from a light breeze, the sky was a dusky blue, with wisps of clouds and flocks of geese decorating the sky from time to time.

NASA flight controllers at the agency’s Mission Control Center have alerted the station’s current Expedition 62 crew, which includes American astronauts Jessica Meir, Andrew Morgan and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Scripochka.

As Northrop Grumman reviews Sunday’s Antares launch glitch, NASA and the European Space Agency are counting down to a different launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is set to launch the joint ESA-NASA Solar Orbiter mission from Cape Canaveral at 11:03 p.m. EST (0403 GMT Feb. 10) to begin an ambitious mission to the sun. The powerful Solar Orbiter is designed to study the sun’s polar regions from orbit to better understand the origins of solar weather and the sun’s magnetic field.

You can watch the Solar Orbiter launch live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, beginning at 10:30 p.m. EST (0330 GMT Feb. 10).

Editor’s note: Space.com senior writer Meghan Bartels contributed to this report from New York City. Editor-in-chief Tariq Malik contributed to this report from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. This story was updated to include a new launch date for the Cygnus NG-13 mission.

The United States really has it in for Huawei. Branded a threat to national security, banned from its U.S. supply chain, unable to sell its advanced networking equipment to rural U.S. carriers via the Universal Service Fund (USF), and blocked from selling its phones through U.S. carriers, it would seem that the Trump administration would be happy if Huawei just closed up shop altogether and went out of business.

Fearful that Huawei’s products contain a backdoor that will send private information to Beijing, the U.S. has tried to get allies not to use the company’s networking equipment for their 5G networks. Australia, France, and Japan heeded the warnings, Germany and Britain did not. That’s because Huawei’s networking equipment is considered at least a year ahead of the gear offered by rivals like Nokia and Ericsson. And because of its ties to China’s state-run bank, Huawei can offer generous financing terms.

Attorney General Barr says that the U.S. should buy Nokia and Ericsson

With cutting-edge technology and the best financing terms, Huawei is the largest supplier of networking equipment in the world. But recently, White House economic adviser Lawrence Kudlow revealed that the U.S. is looking to replace some of Huawei’s hardware with software that can run over hardware made by any manufacturer. Kudlow said that U.S. firms involved in this plan include Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc., and AT&T Inc. Kudlow added that “The big-picture concept is to have all of the U.S. 5G architecture and infrastructure done by American firms, principally. That also could include Nokia and Ericsson because they have big U.S. presences.” He also mentioned that the goal is to use the cloud to replace some of the equipment used on 5G networks. “Dell and Microsoft are now moving very rapidly to develop software and cloud capabilities that will, in fact, replace a lot of the equipment.” An economist by trade, Kudlow said, “To quote Michael Dell, ‘Software is eating the hardware in 5G.’”

Reuters reports that on Thursday, Attorney General William Barr floated a plan that would have the U.S. take control of Nokia and Ericsson. The pair are headquartered in Finland and Sweden respectively. The Attorney General added that this would be done “by the United States aligning itself with Nokia and/or Ericsson,” and “through American ownership of a controlling stake, either directly or through a consortium of private American and allied companies. Putting our large market and financial muscle behind one or both of these firms would make it a far more formidable competitor and eliminate concerns over its staying power, or their staying power. We and our closest allies certainly need to be actively considering this approach.” But Kudlow quickly shot down that plan and said that the “U.S. government is not in the business of buying companies, whether they’re domestic or foreign.” He did note that “there’s nothing to prohibit American tech companies from acquiring (the companies).”

Vice President Mike Pence responded to Barr’s plan by saying, “Great respect to Attorney General Barr, but we believe the best way forward is what (FCC Chairman) Ajit Pai announced just over the last several days. That’s the plan the president has endorsed and will be carrying forward. Pence said that the U.S. can build out the 5G networks it needs “by using the power of the free market and American companies.” The VP is referring to plans that the FCC has to auction off much-needed mid-band spectrum in the C-band (3.7GHz to 4.2GHz range). While this additional spectrum will broaden the ability of 5G signals to cover all of the country, it isn’t clear how it will help carriers avoid Huawei’s networking gear.

It would cost the U.S. government more than $53 billion to purchase Nokia and Ericsson at their current valuations, and stockholders would require a premium to give them an incentive to sell their shares to the U.S. government. Barr’s plan didn’t make it clear where the money would come from to buy the companies. And as T-Mobile and Sprint know, getting a large deal through regulators (in this case both domestic and foreign) would be like threading the eye of a needle.

With a $126 billion fortune, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is certainly the richest person in the world, but he may not be the smartest. At least that’s what Bezos thought as a college student.

Before Bezos ever sold a single book online, he was a physics major at Princeton University in the 1980s. And despite being one of the top 25 students in his honors program, Bezos believed he wasn’t smart enough to compete.

So he changed his major to electrical engineering and computer science, according to Wired, and it changed the course of his life.

“I looked around the room and it was clear to me that there were three people in the class who were much, much better at [physics] than I was, and it was much, much easier for them,” Bezos told Wired in 1999.

“It was really sort of a startling insight, that there were these people whose brains were wired differently,” he said.

Bezos had this epiphany after unsuccessfully struggling to solve a math problem for hours.

“I can’t solve this partial differential equation,” he told the Economic Club of Washington in September 2018. “It’s really really hard. I’m studying with my roommate, Joe, who is also really good at math. The two of us worked on this one homework problem for three hours and got nowhere.”

He and his roommate finally asked a friend, Yasantha Rajakarunanayake, for help.

“We show him this problem, and he looks at it, stares at it for a while, and says ‘Cosine, that’s the answer.’ And i’m like ‘That’s the answer?’ And he’s like ‘Yes, let me show you,’” Bezos said.

“He brings us into his room, he sits us down, he writes out three pages of detailed algebra, everything crosses out, and the answer is cosine. I said, ‘Did you just do that in your head?’ And he said, ‘No, that would be impossible. Three years ago, I solved a very similar problem. I was able to map this problem onto that problem, and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine.’”

According to Bezos, that was the moment he realized he should pursue a different career.

“That was an important moment for me, because that was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” he said at the Economic Club. “I started doing some soul searching. In most occupations, if you’re in the 90th percentile, you’re going to contribute. In theoretical physics, you gotta be one of the top 50 people in the world, or you’re really not helping out much.”

Bezos changed his major and “committed to starting and running his own business,” according to Wired.

Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science.

In 1994 while working at a hedge fund, Bezos found a staggering statistic the web was growing at 2,300% per year, which inspired him to launch Amazon as an online bookseller in 1995. Today the so-called “everything store,” has a market capitalization of over $1 trillion.

“I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science,” Bezos said at the Economic Club.

California’s new privacy law was years in the making.

The law, California’s Consumer Privacy Act — or CCPA — became law on January 1, allowing state residents to reclaim their right to access and control their personal data. Inspired by Europe’s GDPR, the CCPA is the largest statewide privacy law change in a generation. The new law lets users request a copy of the data that tech companies have on them, delete the data when they no longer want a company to have it, and demand that their data isn’t sold to third parties. All of this is much to the chagrin of the tech giants, some of which had spent millions to comply with the law and have many more millions set aside to deal with the anticipated influx of consumer data access requests.

But to say things are going well is a stretch.

Many of the tech giants that kicked and screamed in resistance to the new law have acquiesced and accepted their fate — at least until something different comes along. The California tech scene had more than a year to prepare, but some have made it downright difficult and — ironically — more invasive in some cases for users to exercise their rights, largely because every company has a different interpretation of what compliance should look like.

Alex Davis is just one California resident who tried to use his new rights under the law to make a request to delete his data. He vented his annoyance on Twitter, saying companies have responded to CCPA by making requests “as confusing and difficult as possible in new and worse ways.”

“I’ve never seen such deliberate attempts to confuse with design,” he told TechCrunch. He referred to what he described as “dark patterns,” a type of user interface design that tries to trick users into making certain choices, often against their best interests.

“I tried to make a deletion request but it bogged me down with menus that kept redirecting… things to be turned on and off,” he said.

Despite his frustration, Davis got further than others. Just as some companies have made it easy for users to opt-out of having their data sold by adding the legally required “Do not sell my info” links on their websites, many have not. Some have made it near-impossible to find these “data portals,” which companies set up so users can request a copy of their data or delete it altogether. For now, California companies are still in a grace period — but have until July when the CCPA’s enforcement provisions kick in. Until then, users are finding ways around it — by collating and sharing links to data portals to help others access their data.

“We really see a mixed story on the level of CCPA response right now,” said Jay Cline, who heads up consulting giant PwC’s data privacy practice, describing it as a patchwork of compliance.

PwC’s own data found that only 40% of the largest 600 U.S. companies had a data portal. Only a fraction, Cline said, extended their portals to users outside of California, even though other states are gearing up to push similar laws to the CCPA.

But not all data portals are created equally. Given how much data companies store on us — personal or otherwise — the risks of getting things wrong are greater than ever. Tech companies are still struggling to figure out the best way to verify each data request to access or delete a user’s data without inadvertently giving it away to the wrong person.

Last year, security researcher James Pavur impersonated his fiancee and tricked tech companies into turning over vast amounts of data about her, including credit card information, account logins and passwords and, in one case, a criminal background check. Only a few of the companies asked for verification. Two years ago, Akita founder Jean Yang described someone hacking into her Spotify account and requesting her account data as an “unfortunate consequence” of GDPR, which mandated companies operating on the continent allow users access to their data.

The CCPA says companies should verify a person’s identity to a “reasonable degree of certainty.” For some that’s just an email address to send the data.

Others require sending in even more sensitive information just to prove it’s them.

Indeed, i360, a little-known advertising and data company, until recently asked California residents for a person’s full Social Security number. This recently changed to just the last four-digits. Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) wants its customers and users to upload their driver’s license or state ID to verify their identity. Comcast asks for the same, but goes the extra step by asking for a selfie before it will turn over any of a customer’s data.

Comcast asks for the same amount of information to verify a data request as the controversial facial recognition startup, Clearview AI, which recently made headlines for creating a surveillance system made up of billions of images scraped from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to help law enforcement trace a person’s movements.

As much as CCPA has caused difficulties, it has helped forge an entirely new class of compliance startups ready to help large and small companies alike handle the regulatory burdens to which they are subject. Several startups in the space are taking advantage of the $55 billion expected to be spent on CCPA compliance in the next year — like Segment, which gives customers a consolidated view of the data they store; Osano which helps companies comply with CCPA; and Securiti, which just raised $50 million to help expand its CCPA offering. With CCPA and GDPR under their belts, their services are designed to scale to accommodate new state or federal laws as they come in.

Another startup, Mine, which lets users “take ownership” of their data by acting as a broker to allow users to easily make requests under CCPA and GDPR, had a somewhat bumpy debut.

The service asks users to grant them access to a user’s inbox, scanning for email subject lines that contain company names and using that data to determine which companies a user can request their data from or have their data deleted. (The service requests access to a user’s Gmail but the company claims it will “never read” users’ emails.) Last month during a publicity push, Mine inadvertently copied a couple of emailed data requests to TechCrunch, allowing us to see the names and email addresses of two requesters who wanted Crunch, a popular gym chain with a similar name, to delete their data.

TechCrunch alerted Mine — and the two requesters — to the security lapse.

“This was a mix-up on our part where the engine that finds companies’ data protection offices’ addresses identified the wrong email address,” said Gal Ringel, co-founder and chief executive at Mine. “This issue was not reported during our testing phase and we’ve immediately fixed it.”

For now, many startups have caught a break.

The smaller, early-stage startups that don’t yet make $25 million in annual revenue or store the personal data on more than 50,000 users or devices will largely escape having to immediately comply with CCPA. But it doesn’t mean startups can be complacent. As early-stage companies grow, so will their legal responsibilities.

“For those who did launch these portals and offer rights to all Americans, they are in the best position to be ready for these additional states,” said Cline. “Smaller companies in some ways have an advantage for compliance if their products or services are commodities, because they can build in these controls right from the beginning,” he said.

CCPA may have gotten off to a bumpy start, but time will tell if things get easier. Just this week, California’s attorney general Xavier Becerra released newly updated guidance aimed at trying to “fine tune” the rules, per his spokesperson. It goes to show that even California’s lawmakers are still trying to get the balance right.

But with the looming threat of hefty fines just months away, time is running out for the non-compliant.

President Trump is seeking billions of dollars in new funding for NASA aimed at returning astronauts to the moon within four years, according to administration officials.

Trump will propose a 12 percent budget increase for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration when he releases his spending plan next week. The boost includes funding to develop human landers, Fox News has confirmed.

No one has been to the moon since 1972 under NASA’s now-shuttered Apollo program. But since taking office, Trump has made space exploration a top priority, and his administration has set a target of 2024 for the next lunar landing.

NASA’s new space program named Artemis, for the Greek goddess of the moon and sister to Apollo, aims to put the first woman on the moon. Long-term, NASA wants to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon with the goal of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s.

Trump’s budget will increase NASA spending from about $22.6 billion to $25.2 billion in fiscal 2021, one of the biggest spending increases requested since the 1990s. The NASA budget proposal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The big lunar budget request is in addition to Trump’s other astronomical project: Space Force. Trump signed an Oval Office directive last February to make the Space Force the sixth branch of the military, with a mission to patrol the orbit and protect the U.S. from attacks.

Trump’s budget would have to get approval from the Republican-controlled Senate and Democrat-majority House, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump previewed the proposal in Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

“We must embrace the next frontier, America’s manifest destiny in the stars,” said Trump, who invited a young aspiring astronaut to the Capitol as one of his guests.

“I am asking the Congress to fully fund the Artemis program to ensure that the next man and the first woman on the moon will be American astronauts — using this as a launching pad to ensure that America is the first nation to plant its flag on Mars.”

The White House also wants to double funding for artificial intelligence research and quantum information sciences to nearly $3 billion by 2022.

The investment in quantum computing to develop technology millions of times faster than today’s supercomputers was first reported by Reuters.

Meanwhile, Trump aims to cut down on government waste by ending the federal government’s use-it-or-lose-it spending sprees. Agencies have splurged on alcohol, lobster tail, crab and workout equipment at the end of the year to show Congress there’s no money left over for lawmakers to cut.

Trump also wants to crack down on improper payments, such as paying nearly $1 billion to dead people since 2004 in benefits payments.

Uber Technologies Inc (UBER.N) and Lyft Inc (LYFT.O), the two leading U.S. ride-hailing companies, are on divergent paths as Uber pours money into money-losing side businesses while smaller rival Lyft focuses on moving people around.

Uber shares shot up 9% on Friday after the company said on Thursday it could achieve a measure of company-wide profitability in the fourth quarter of 2020, a year ahead of a previous target. That measure excludes expenses for stock-based compensation and other items. Uber still expects to lose more than $1 billion for all of 2020.

Uber and Lyft, both based in San Francisco, are ride hailing’s odd couple. Uber is much larger, with $3.8 billion in revenues for the first nine months of 2019 compared to $956 million for Lyft. At almost $69 billion, Uber’s market valuation is nearly five times that of Lyft’s – and well ahead of automaker General Motors Co(GM.N).

Uber operates in more markets around the world, although it has clashed with regulators in London and Germany and struggled in some Asian markets. Lyft focuses on North America.

Lyft has more quickly developed ways to retain high-paying repeat riders across its entire operation via a single subscription model it launched in October. Uber on Thursday told investors 2020 would be the “year of subscriptions” when it plans to combine its loyalty programs across rides and food delivery into a single plan.

Uber currently offers a cross-platform points rewards program and in 2018 launched a monthly subscription that protects riders against surge pricing because of traffic or weather, available in 40 U.S. cities.

Uber’s ride-hailing business, which generates around three quarters of its revenue, is profitable right now. Uber’s other operations are dragging down the company’s bottom line. Over the past five years, Uber has built out its food-delivery business Eats, developed self-driving cars, worked on long-haul trucking operations and even on commercial passenger drone shuttles.

All of those businesses are money losers. Uber Eats recorded an adjusted EBITDA loss of $777 million in the last two quarters of 2019, the two quarters for which it broke out that metric.

Most major analysts still prefer shares of Uber. Its size, the profitability of its ride-hailing segment and its ability to withstand regional downturns or regulatory pressure in a single market made it a safer long-term investment, said Angelo Zino, analyst at CFRA.

But some analysts said Lyft is a less-risky bet.

“We prefer Lyft because it focuses on the most profitable business in North America, the largest rides market,” Cascend Securities analyst Eric Ross said.

Uber and Lyft declined to comment.

Lyft is reporting fourth quarter earnings on Feb. 11. In October it told investors it would be adjusted EBITDA profitable by the end of 2021. Analysts said they did not expect Lyft to move its profit target.

Lyft has integrated public transit information into its app for seven U.S. cities in the hopes of turning its app into a single transportation platform. Uber has integrated transit information of eight U.S. cities and allows customers in Las Vegas and Denver to purchase public transit tickets through its app.

Dan Morgan, portfolio manager at Synovus Trust, said Uber should focus on what it does best – connecting customers through its app – and ditch efforts to develop its own self-driving cars or passenger drone technology.

“If you’re losing as much money as Uber, it makes sense to leave those businesses to other companies who have the competency,” Morgan said.

The U.S. Attorney General said America should consider taking a controlling stake in European telecoms equipment makers Nokia and Ericsson to “blunt” Chinese firm Huawei’s “drive to domination.”

William Barr’s comments come after President Donald Trump expressed “apoplectic” fury towards U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson over Britain’s decision to allow Huawei limited participation in its 5G networks, according to a report from the Financial Times.

5G refers to next-generation mobile networks that promise super fast data speeds and will become critical to future infrastructure. Washington has maintained that Huawei’s equipment could be used for espionage on Americans by Beijing. The U.S. also argues that if Huawei owns 5G infrastructure, by default, it’s in the hands of China and they could shut down networks at any time. Huawei has denied all of the allegations.

The U.S. has been pressuring allies, including the U.K., to completely block Huawei from its 5G networks. But last month, Britain decided to allow Huawei to participate in a limited part of the 5G rollout and limit the Chinese company’s market share, in a move that was seen as a test for the relationship between the U.K. and U.S.

The FT reported, citing officials, that after this decision, Trump and Johnson had a phone call in which the U.S. president expressed anger at the British Prime Minister.

The White House and Downing Street were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

Huawei competitor

Huawei’s biggest rivals are Finnish firm Nokia and Swedish company Ericsson. The U.S. does not have a rival to the Chinese firm.

But there have been rising calls to create an American competitor, a tough task given the long lead time and high cost it would take to develop the technology and the fact that 5G has already begun rolling out globally.

Instead, Barr offered a different option, suggesting the U.S. find a way to take a controlling stake in Nokia and Ericsson.

“We have to make a decision on the horse we’re going to ride in this race,” Barr said during a speech at a conference run by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Who is the 5G equipment supplier or suppliers that we will rely on to compete against Huawei around the globe to win contracts from operators and blunt Huawei’s drive to domination?”

He said the Nokia and Ericsson don’t have “Huawei’s scale nor the backing of a powerful country with a large embedded market like China” and suggested the U.S. “actively” consider buying a stake.

“There have been some proposals that these concerns could be met by the United States aligning itself with Nokia and or Ericsson through American ownership of a controlling stake either directly or through a consortium of private American and allied companies,” Barr said.

“Putting our large market and financial muscle behind one or both of these firms, would make it a far more formidable competitor and eliminate concerns over … their staying power.”

Ericsson declined to comment when contacted by CNBC.

“We always welcome investor interest in Nokia. Beyond that we cannot comment on Mr Barr’s statement,” a Nokia spokesperson told CNBC.

Ericsson shares were up near 3.7% around 10:0 a.m. London time while Nokia was just shy of 4% higher.

Potential Ericsson deal ‘positive’

Ericsson’s biggest shareholder Cevian Capital said U.S. interest in technology firm, is “clearly positive” for the company, Sweden and shareholders.

“An acquisition is really the only alternative if the U.S. wants to be leading in this area (5G). Such an acquisition would in turn mean significant resources to invest on innovation and market leadership,” Christer Gardell, managing partner at Cevian Capital, told CNBC by email.

He said that any deal would be based on a “completely different valuation level than today for Ericsson,” claiming the current share price “greatly undervalues the company’s long-term fundamentals.”

But ultimately, Gardell appeared to back an American deal.

“It is clearly better for Sweden, the company, the employees and the shareholders that an American deal is done with Ericsson and not with Nokia. The board and management need to drive and handle this question with the highest priority,” he said.

Just how the U.S. could take a stake in Ericsson and Nokia remains to be seen. There are also questions over whether such a move may raise concerns with the European Union.

“Both Ericsson and Nokia are publicly listed, meaning that the US could build a stake that way, but how they would do it remains to be seen, as this is not something they usually do with US companies, let alone foreign ones,” Dexter Thillien, senior analyst at Fitch Solutions, told CNBC by email.

“I don’t think Ericsson and Nokia would be particularly happy about it either, because it reinforces the perception that they’re so far behind Huawei they need US state help, and might give China the excuse to ban the from the country (it’s a small part of their respective overall revenues).”

If NASA is going to fulfill its goal of returning to the Moon by 2024, it’s going to need a lot of money in very short order — and that might be forthcoming. The Trump administration is proposing one of the largest NASA budgets in years as part of its latest budget, earmarking $25 billion for the space agency versus the $19 billion from the first year of the administration and $22 billion for this year. Nearly $3 billion of that would be devoted to creating the vehicles needed for the Artemis program. The budget is also poised to outline Artemis’ complete costs and provide a clearer roadmap for the 2024 mission.

The problem, of course, is that budgets need congressional approval — and there’s no guarantee the budget will go through Congress unaltered. A House subcommittee recently put forward a bill that would push the Moon landing to 2028 and shift the focus to a Mars orbital mission in 2033. And it wouldn’t be surprising to see politicians contend that those billions should go toward addressing lingering problems here on Earth rather than space missions with limited initial utility.

Should the budget go through, however, it would represent a considerably deeper commitment to Artemis than in the past. While some of the pieces are already falling into place, this would clearly make room for much more.

NASA’s Christina Koch returned to Earth safely on Thursday after shattering the spaceflight record for female astronauts with a stay of almost 11 months aboard the International Space Station.

Koch touched down at 09:12 GMT on the Kazakh steppe after 328 days in space, along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency.

Koch was shown seated and smiling broadly after being extracted from the Soyuz descent module in the Roscosmos space agency’s video footage from the landing site.

“I am so overwhelmed and happy right now,” said Koch, who blasted off on 14 March last year.

Parmitano pumped his fists in the air after being lifted into his chair while Skvortsov was shown eating an apple.

Local Kazakhs on horseback were among those to witness the capsule landing in the snow-covered steppe as support crews gathered around the three astronauts, NASA commentator Rob Navias said.

“I’ve never seen this,” Navias exclaimed, reporting that the men stopped to chat with engineering personnel.

Koch, a 41-year-old Michigan-born engineer, on 28 December last year beat the previous record for a single spaceflight by a woman of 289 days, set by NASA veteran Peggy Whitson in 2016-17.

Koch called three-time flyer Whitson, now 60, “a heroine of mine” and a “mentor” in the space programme after she surpassed the record.

She also spoke of her desire to “inspire the next generation of explorers.”

Koch also made history as one half of the first-ever all-woman spacewalk along with NASA counterpart Jessica Meir – her classmate from NASA training – in October last year.

The spacewalk was initially postponed because the space station did not have two suits of the right size, leading to allegations of sexism.

Ahead of the three-and-a-half hour journey back to Earth, Koch told NBC on Tuesday that she would “miss microgravity”.

“It’s really fun to be in a place where you can just bounce around between the ceiling and the floor whenever you want,” she said, smiling as she twisted her body around the ISS.

She will now head to NASA headquarters in Houston, via the Kazakh city of Karaganda and Cologne in Germany, where she will undergo medical testing.

Koch’s medical data will be especially valuable to NASA scientists as the agency draws up plans for a long-duration manned mission to Mars.

‘Make space for women’

Koch’s return comes after an advert for a skincare brand ran during an intermission in the American football Super Bowl with a call to “make space for women”.

The advert featured NASA astronaut Nicole Stott and saw the company promise to donate up to US$500,000 to the non-profit Women Who Code, which works with young women seeking careers in tech and scientific fields.

The first woman in space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova whose spaceflight in 1963 is still the only solo mission carried out by a woman.

Russia has sent only one woman to the ISS since expeditions began in 2000 – Yelena Serova whose mission launched in 2014.

Both Tereshkova and Serova are now lawmakers in the Russian parliament, where they represent the ruling United Russia party.

Unlike Koch, whose ISS stay was extended, Parmitano and Skvortsov were rounding off regular half-year missions.

Parmitano handed over command of the ISS to Roscosmos’s Oleg Skripochka on Tuesday.

The 43-year-old Italian posted regular shots of the Earth while aboard, highlighting the plight of the Amazon rainforest and describing the Alps as “like a spinal column, never bending to time”.

Four male cosmonauts have spent a year or longer in space as part of a single mission with Russian Valery Polyakov’s 437 days the overall record.

Scott Kelly holds the record for a NASA astronaut, posting 340 days at the ISS before he returned home in 2016.