Butch and Suni’s Long, Strange Trip in Space

Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are finally home after nine months at the International Space Station. What was supposed to be an eight-day mission turned into a much longer stay when Boeing’s Starliner suffered a series of malfunctions and was eventually declared unsafe to carry them home.

“The episode marks a major setback to NASA’s long-term goal of helping private companies, including Boeing, develop and fly their own space vehicles,” writes Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow James B. Meigs. “That program, known as Commercial Crew, allows NASA to avoid the expense of building and launching its own spacecraft and instead to fly its astronauts aboard privately owned rockets and crew vehicles.”

NASA expected Boeing to be a leader in the effort, but instead SpaceX has become “the agency’s indispensable partner in delivering crews and cargo to the space station,” Meigs writes. Indeed, the astronauts traveled home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

Read Meigs’s consideration of what the debacle will mean for the industry and America’s role in space exploration.

The Biden administration and green-energy advocates claim an “unstoppable” clean energy revolution is underway—but the data say otherwise. Despite $9 trillion spent on renewables, fossil-fuel use continues to grow. Human history shows that energy sources don’t disappear; they accumulate. Even today, wood supplies more energy than all solar and wind combined. The only real transition happening is in political rhetoric. President Trump’s rollback of Green New Deal policies reflects a return to energy reality, writes City Journal contributing editor Mark P. Mills.

Immediately after his arrest, accused Hamas sympathizer Mahmoud Khalil saw his case taken on by no fewer than 19 lawyers, note Liel Leibovitz, editor at large for Tablet, and Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. They look at two of the attorneys at the forefront of his defense here.

A federal judge’s shocking order to turn back deportation flights midair is just the latest example of lower-court overreach on immigration. The judiciary has long clashed with the executive branch over border policy, but past administrations—like George H. W. Bush’s—successfully fought back. Michael A. Fragoso argues that the Supreme Court should act now to curb activist lower-court judges before they push the country into a constitutional crisis.

You may have heard of Andrew Tate for his protracted legal fight in Romania against charges of rape, abuse, and sex trafficking. But he has developed a massive online following of disaffected young men who admire his image of strength and willingness to confront feminist taboos.

Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo writes that Tate is a symptom of the disease afflicting men in society today. “Tate is to masculinity what pornography is to sex: a degraded form of the original, superficially attractive but profoundly empty,” he writes. “It’s an empty masculinity that will enrich the pusher but leave the customer—in this case, young men—shriveled and broken.”

“Finally, I have a partner in thinking that OPS is a lousy statistic. It makes no sense mathematically. It is like evaluating a car by adding its gas mileage with its acceleration time to 60 mph. Mr. McGillis has invented a statistic that makes perfect sense and is enlightening. BABE is the statistic we have been waiting for. Now, SABR [the Society for American Baseball Research] needs to embrace it as a useful tool in evaluating hitters.”

Photo credits: MIGUEL J. RODRIGUEZ CARRILLO / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images