Latest news with #Dreier
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
GoMining wants to make Bitcoin mining liquid, tradable, and rig-free
GoMining wants to make Bitcoin mining liquid, tradable, and rig-free originally appeared on TheStreet. GoMining lets users mine Bitcoin without ever touching a rig. Instead of buying physical hardware, users purchase digital miners—NFTs backed by real hash power from GoMining's data centers. Each miner is unique, customizable by efficiency and size, and fully owned on-chain. By using NFTs rather than traditional tokens, GoMining gives miners the ability to upgrade, trade, and scale their assets—transforming what was once a static process into something dynamic and liquid. 'Most people think NFT, they think it's a JPEG,' says Jeremy Dreier, Chief Business Development Officer at GoMining. 'But it's the underlying technology that allows each individual miner to have ownership over a specific amount of hash power—and every miner is unique.' Miners vary in power, ranging from 1 to 5,000 terahash, and users can choose between different energy efficiency levels. According to Dreier, NFTs were the only token format that made sense for such non-identical, customizable assets. 'The best technology to represent that in a tokenized form is an NFT,' he explains. 'They represent real-world assets—our data center hash power—and allow for true ownership and transferability.' But GoMining isn't just relying on NFTs. The company also operates a utility token that powers the ecosystem, offering users discounts, upgrades, and access to a peer-to-peer miner marketplace. 'When users pay for power and maintenance with the GoMining token, they can get up to a 20% discount,' says Dreier. 'They can also use it to upgrade their miners and make them more efficient over time.' GoMining's marketplace allows users to buy and sell digital miners freely—creating secondary liquidity and flexibility rarely seen in the mining space. 'You're not reliant on hardware life cycles anymore,' Dreier adds. 'It opens up a whole new model for entering and exiting Bitcoin mining.' With deflationary tokenomics and NFTs as digital hardware, GoMining is merging DeFi mechanics with Bitcoin infrastructure—making mining more flexible, more liquid, and a lot more user-friendly. GoMining wants to make Bitcoin mining liquid, tradable, and rig-free first appeared on TheStreet on Jun 12, 2025 This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jun 12, 2025, where it first appeared. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Los Angeles Times
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, 'NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration,' says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on 'practical, quantitative,' even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: 'America will always be the first in space,' he said during his first term. 'We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led.' Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that 'the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that.' Among the 'foreign class of servants,' whom Vance acknowledged included 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. 'Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles,' Dreier observes. In this White House, however, 'there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency.' A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a 'hoax.' He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its 'misguided ... Global Climate Change programs,' and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is 'very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do' in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. 'Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money,' Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but 'I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates,' Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. 'You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space,' he told me. 'It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes.'
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Contributor: To dumbly go where no space budget has gone before
Reports that the White House may propose nearly a 50% cut to NASA's Science Mission Directorate are both mind-boggling and, if true, nothing short of disastrous. To make those cuts happen — a total of $3.6 billion — NASA would have to close the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and cancel the mission that will bring back samples of Mars, a mission to Venus and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is nearly ready to launch. Every space telescope besides the Hubble and the James Webb would be shut down. According to the American Astronomical Society, some cuts would include projects that help us understand the sun's effects on global communications, a potential national security threat. Casey Dreier, the policy advocate for the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, says, 'This is an extinction-level event for the Earth- and space-science communities, upending decades of work and tens of billions in taxpayers' investment.' Read more: Mars rocks are a science prize the U.S. can't afford to lose In addition, NASA as a whole would see a 20% cut — just as we are moving forward with the Artemis program. Artemis is NASA's step-by-step 'Moon to Mars' human spaceflight campaign. Artemis II is set to launch sometime next year and will send four astronauts on a lunar fly-by, the first time humans have been in close proximity to another celestial body in more than 50 years. While it seems likely that Artemis will continue in some fashion, a 20% overall agency budget cut won't leave any part of NASA unaffected. The president promised a 'golden age of America'; his nominee to head NASA promised a 'golden age of science and discovery.' This would be a return to the dark ages. Taking a blowtorch to space science would also have little effect on the federal budget while setting back American leadership in space — and the inspiration it provides across political divides — by generations. Read more: Earth 1, asteroids 0: The next generation of planetary defense takes shape at JPL The Astronomical Society warns that our cutbacks will outsource talent 'to other countries that are increasing their investments in facilities and workforce development.' And, as Dreier points out, spacecraft would be 'left to tumble aimlessly in space' and billions wasted that have already been spent. 'Thousands of bright students across the country,' he wrote recently, 'would be denied careers in science and engineering absent the fellowships and research funds to support them.' Here's the dollars-and-cents context. NASA's budget since the 1970s "hovers" between 1% and 0.4% of the federal discretionary spending, according to the Planetary Society's analysis, yet for every dollar spent, NASA generates $3 in the national economy. NASA's giveback was worth nearly $76 billion in economic impact in 2023, supporting more than 300,000 jobs. In California alone, NASA and its associated partners in industry and academia provide more than 66,000 jobs, more than $18 billion in economic activity and $1 billion in state tax revenue. NASA's bang-for-the-buck is astronomical, pun intended. Cutting waste is one thing. Evisceration is another. When it comes to science — from public health to climate change — the current administration is doing the latter, not the former. Read more: Saturn's moon looked like a snowy Utah landscape in my mind. The reality is just as compelling Meanwhile, China continues its space ambitions, with plans for a human lunar campaign and its own 'sample return' mission to the Red Planet. For now, fortunately, the bipartisan support for NASA seems to be holding. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, led by the Planetary Science Caucus, have spoken out against this attack on NASA. And the Planetary Society has engaged thousands of passionate activists to fight this battle. Humans yearn for connection to the universe — so we watch launches on social media, we follow the tracks of rovers on Mars and we marvel at creation in pictures transmitted from the James Webb Space Telescope. We borrow telescopes from the public library and look to the heavens. Bending metal — the actual process of making rovers and spaceships and telescopes — drives economic activity. Fascinating results — the data from space science missions — fires the imagination. We choose to go to space — sending humans and probes — and we pursue knowledge because curiosity is our evolutionary heritage. We explore other worlds to know them and, in doing so, we discover more about ourselves. If you agree, let Congress know. That may be the only backstop against dumbly going where no budget has gone before. Christopher Cokinos is a nature-and science writer whose most recent book is "Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow." If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
To dumbly go where no space budget has gone before
Reports that the White House may propose nearly a 50% cut to NASA's Science Mission Directorate are both mind-boggling and, if true, nothing short of disastrous. To make those cuts happen — a total of $3.6 billion — NASA would have to close the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and cancel the mission that will bring back samples of Mars, a mission to Venus and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is nearly ready to launch. Every space telescope besides the Hubble and the James Webb would be shut down. According to the American Astronomical Society, some cuts would include projects that help us understand the sun's effects on global communications, a potential national security threat. Casey Dreier, the policy advocate for the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, says, 'This is an extinction-level event for the Earth- and space-science communities, upending decades of work and tens of billions in taxpayers' investment.' In addition, NASA as a whole would see a 20% cut — just as we are moving forward with the Artemis program. Artemis is NASA's step-by-step 'Moon to Mars' human spaceflight campaign. Artemis II is set to launch sometime next year and will send four astronauts on a lunar fly-by, the first time humans have been in close proximity to another celestial body in more than 50 years. While it seems likely that Artemis will continue in some fashion, a 20% overall agency budget cut won't leave any part of NASA unaffected. The president promised a 'golden age of America'; his nominee to head NASA promised a 'golden age of science and discovery.' This would be a return to the dark ages. Taking a blowtorch to space science would also have little effect on the federal budget while setting back American leadership in space — and the inspiration it provides across political divides — by generations. The Astronomical Society warns that our cutbacks will outsource talent 'to other countries that are increasing their investments in facilities and workforce development.' And, as Dreier points out, spacecraft would be 'left to tumble aimlessly in space' and billions wasted that have already been spent. 'Thousands of bright students across the country,' he wrote recently, 'would be denied careers in science and engineering absent the fellowships and research funds to support them.' Here's the dollars-and-cents context. NASA's budget since the 1970s 'hovers' between 1% and 0.4% of the federal discretionary spending, according to the Planetary Society's analysis, yet for every dollar spent, NASA generates $3 in the national economy. NASA's giveback was worth nearly $76 billion in economic impact in 2023, supporting more than 300,000 jobs. In California alone, NASA and its associated partners in industry and academia provide more than 66,000 jobs, more than $18 billion in economic activity and $1 billion in state tax revenue. NASA's bang-for-the-buck is astronomical, pun intended. Cutting waste is one thing. Evisceration is another. When it comes to science — from public health to climate change — the current administration is doing the latter, not the former. Meanwhile, China continues its space ambitions, with plans for a human lunar campaign and its own 'sample return' mission to the Red Planet. For now, fortunately, the bipartisan support for NASA seems to be holding. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, led by the Planetary Science Caucus, have spoken out against this attack on NASA. And the Planetary Society has engaged thousands of passionate activists to fight this battle. Humans yearn for connection to the universe — so we watch launches on social media, we follow the tracks of rovers on Mars and we marvel at creation in pictures transmitted from the James Webb Space Telescope. We borrow telescopes from the public library and look to the heavens. Bending metal — the actual process of making rovers and spaceships and telescopes — drives economic activity. Fascinating results — the data from space science missions — fires the imagination. We choose to go to space — sending humans and probes — and we pursue knowledge because curiosity is our evolutionary heritage. We explore other worlds to know them and, in doing so, we discover more about ourselves. If you agree, let Congress know. That may be the only backstop against dumbly going where no budget has gone before. Christopher Cokinos is a nature-and science writer whose most recent book is 'Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow.'
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump administration could slash NASA science budget by 50%, reports suggest
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Reports circulating about the White House's proposed NASA budget for the 2026 fiscal year suggest the agency's funding could be slashed by nearly half. As reported by Ars Technica, so-called "passback" documents given to the agency on Thursday (April 10) outline these Trump administration budget plans. Besides an almost 50% cut across the board for NASA science programs, they propose a "two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50% cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion." "We would see, in this case, the majority of active science missions and in-development science missions completely wiped out," Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, told "I have this image in my head of a perfectly functioning spacecraft designed to increase our understanding of the cosmos in which we reside turned off and left to tumble aimlessly in the black — that's where we would leave ourselves. It's symbolically grotesque." It's like a nuclear bomb going off." According to the document, the proposed budget would continue to support science missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope, but assumes "no funding is provided for other telescopes." This means it'd likely get rid of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — a spacecraft that's already assembled and undergoing testing to launch as early as next fall, Dreier says. "That has been the poster child for a mission that has remained on budget and on track with the one hiccup around COVID, which isn't the mission's fault," he said. "We've invested nearly $4 billion in building it to this point, 20 years of effort to build it." The passback documents also suggest closing down the entirety of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, meaning the approximately 10,000 workers at that center would probably be laid off in tandem. "It's like a nuclear bomb going off. It's NASA's largest center," Dreier said. Though these passback documents aren't a full confirmation that this budget will be finalized, Dreier says it's the last train out of the station before we get to that point — and in his expert opinion, Dreier believes this proposal certainly could move through to the end. This is especially because of the kinds of changes, including major layoffs and project cancellations, that have been implemented at other government organizations by request of the Trump administration. "It is consistent with their willingness to impose some very profound and dramatic change," he said. For instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) laid off over 800 workers this year and there are rumors of more cuts to come. In fact, an internal budget document seen by Science magazine suggests the Trump administration wishes to cut nearly all of NOAA's climate research endeavors. According to Science's report, the document indicates the White House intends to ask Congress to eliminate NOAA's climate research centers and cut hundreds more federal and academic climate scientists. "This would end basically every project we support other than hurricane and atmospheric river reconnaissance, coastal mapping, and snow survey — all of which are funded by either the national weather service or national geodetic survey. All marine mammal, atmospheric science and climate projects would end," one NOAA worker who requested anonymity told RELATED STORIES — 'Their loss diminishes us all': Scientists emphasize how Trump's mass NOAA layoffs endanger the world — Scientists warn of consequences as over 800 NOAA workers are fired: 'Censoring science does not change the facts' — Trump administration's NOAA layoffs affected the space weather service that tracks solar storms "This is one of the reasons why you have a public sector: To do things that aren't immediately profitable, but important and beneficial to the nation," Dreier said. "There's no private mission ready to go to Mars or Jupiter. These are fundamental capabilities of a public sector space agency serving a unique need." "We've seen wealthy individuals start to travel in space themselves and invest in rockets and infrastructure," he added. "But something we have not seen by anyone, and nor has anyone even shown much interest in, is to build these types of science missions." For instance, Dreier emphasizes how difficult it would be to finance another Voyager mission — the NASA endeavor that sent twin spacecraft to explore the territory beyond our solar system in 1977. Both spacecraft entered interstellar space decades after liftoff, and have sent back to Earth some of the most fascinating and important astrophysics information to date. "If you cut heliophysics by half, which is what funds Voyager, you probably cut Voyager," Dreier said. "Even if you made a new one, you couldn't even get to where it is now for another 50 years — and we're not going to make a new one [if] we don't have any money." "Once these are gone, they're gone."
