The spacecraft will have to carry four astronauts for missions lasting weeks. Orion was conceived more than 10 years ago but – with the newly defined Nasa goal of returning to the Moon – the programme is finally starting to come together. With the SLS rocket also taking shape, and with testing well advanced on both the launcher and spacecraft, it’s a reasonable bet that astronauts will take their maiden flight by 2025.
Hundreds of thousands of students, parents, teachers and their supporters took to the streets on March 24, 2018 in a mass show of force in favor of gun control and school safety. More than 800 marches across the U.S. and around the world took place in support of the main March For Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C. that was organized by survivors of the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Here’s what it looks like on the ground, from London and Paris to Sao Paulo and Miami.
Water shortage is a pressing issue worldwide: According to the UN, 1.2 billion people (almost one-fifth of the world’s population) live in areas where water is scarce, and another 500 million people are nearing this situation. It’s no wonder, then, that the world is seeking to produce and conserve water – both for drinking and for agriculture – especially during droughts.
The Torah tells how God created the earth and the heavens, although the stories that follow tell us more about the former than the latter. A new exhibit doesn’t quite answer theological questions about space, but it does show the ways in which Jews have looked at, written about and traveled into the final frontier. “Jews in Space: Members of the Tribe in Orbit,” named after a Mel Brooks gag, is an exhibit organized and on view at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Center for Jewish History here. It features both Yiddish and Hebrew books on astronomy and astrology, science fiction works created by Jews and sections on the history of Jewish astronauts.