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Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration voted easily and quickly to recommend that the agency give emergency use authorization to Moderna's coronavirus vaccine. CNN reports: The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted 20-0 with one abstention to recommend EUA for the Moderna vaccine, which is very similar in design, composition, safety and efficacy to Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine. That was the only question facing the committee -- whether to recommend EUA. "There's no doubt in my mind that the data -- it looks like the benefits outweigh the risks, from what I've seen," committee member Dr. Steven Pergam, of the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said before the vote. That did not, however, stop the collection of academics, physicians, public health specialists and others from getting into a lengthy discussion about whether Moderna should offer the vaccine to people who got saline shots -- something that might have the effect of reducing long-term data on how well and safely the vaccine protects people from infection. "Academics have a way of getting involved in details, and what we have done for the last eight or nine hours was to go over the details," Dr. Arnold Monto, an infectious disease specialist and professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, who chairs the panel, said after the vote. He noted the vote this time was more one-sided than last week's vote to recommend Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine, which came down 17 for, 4 against, with one abstention. Similar to Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine, the Moderna vaccine uses messenger RNA or mRNA that prompts the body to produce compounds that look like the outside of the coronavirus, causing an immune response that protects against infection. The report notes that "Each vaccine is about 95% effective in preventing symptomatic illness, with few side effects."

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The U.S. nuclear weapons agency and at least three states were hacked as part of a suspected Russian cyber attack that struck a number of federal government agencies. Microsoft Corp. was also breached, and its products were used to further attacks on others, Reuters reported. Bloomberg reports: The Energy Department and its National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains America's nuclear stockpile, were targeted as part of the larger attack, according to a person familiar with the matter. An ongoing investigation has found the hack didn't affect "mission-essential national security functions," Shaylyn Hynes, a Department of Energy spokeswoman, said in a statement. "At this point, the investigation has found that the malware has been isolated to business networks only," Hynes said. The hack of the nuclear agency was reported earlier by Politico. In addition, two people familiar with the broader government investigation into the attack said three states were breached, though they wouldn't identify the states. A third person familiar with the probe confirmed that states were hacked but didn't provide a number. In an advisory Thursday that signaled the widening alarm over the the breach, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the hackers posed a "grave risk" to federal, state and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure and the private sector. The agency said the attackers demonstrated "sophistication and complex tradecraft."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: If you're unfortunate enough to breathe wildfire smoke, you're getting a lungful of charred plant material, noxious gases, and -- if the fire tore through human structures -- incinerated synthetic materials. All across the board, it's bad stuff, proven to be a severe detriment to human health, particularly for those with respiratory conditions like asthma. And not to pile on the worries, but that haze also turns out to be loaded with microbes like bacteria and fungi. The problem is, scientists have only just begun to study this smoky microbial community. That led a pair of researchers to publish a new perspective piece in the journal Science today calling for a multidisciplinary push to better characterize these microbes and determine how they might be making wildfire smoke even worse for human lungs. "It's not just comprised of particulate matter and gases, but it also has a significant living component in it," says University of Idaho fire scientist Leda Kobziar, coauthor of the piece. Wildfire smoke may actually spread beneficial organisms for an ecosystem, Kobziar adds, but "what might the consequences be for the spread of pathogens that we know are airborne?" But hold on a tick: Shouldn't the microbes get cooked to death in the flames? Well, that's not giving these microbes any credit. You see, a wildfire burns with different intensities at different spots as it moves across a landscape. "At the smallest scales, complete combustion is coupled with incomplete combustion," says Kobziar. "Even at one centimeter, you could get very high temperatures for long durations, and at the next centimeter, it can be completely skipped, and no heat at all. So that degree of variability provides a lot of pockets in which these microbes could survive fire." Instead of perishing, they hitch rides on bits of charred carbon and in water vapor, as the wildfire's heat propels all of the muck skyward. If they end up in tiny droplets of water, this could well protect them from desiccation as they travel downwind. "We know that microbes attached to dust particles are certainly transported across continents," Kobziar says. "So we have no reason to believe that that's not also occurring in smoke as smoke travels. But how long do they survive, and which ones survive? That is an open question, and that's exactly the kind of research that we're hoping this paper will inspire."

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Microsoft says in a blog post that PepsiCo is using their Project Bonsai "machine teaching" service to "help ensure its Cheetos cheese-puff snacks all have the same texture, crunch and shape," reports The Wall Street Journal. From the blog post: PepsiCo built a computer vision system that continually monitors Cheeto attributes. Data about qualities such as density and length are fed to the Project Bonsai solution, which makes adjustments to bring the product within spec. This approach reduces the time it takes to correct inconsistencies and allows operators to focus on parts of the line that require human expertise. PepsiCo is preparing to use the solution in a production plant and exploring how to use the solution with other products, including the tortilla chip manufacturing process. An out-of-spec product can't be sold, which leads to wasted resources, time, and money. Greater consistency helps PepsiCo maintain high quality products while maximizing throughput. To make an ideal Cheeto, the solution needed examples of what wasn't ideal -- and needed to know what to do in those cases. The extruder line is self-contained and well-suited for developing and testing an autonomous system solution. Operators had been running it manually, which gave developers the opportunity to build the solution from scratch, instead of on top of other software. The AI solution has a recommendation mode and a closed loop control mode. In both modes, a computer vision system continuously measures the quality of the Cheetos. In recommendation mode, the AI will alert an operator if the product drifts out of spec, displaying on an instrument panel the attributes that are not ideal as well as a recommendation to correct it. The operator can push a button to make any or all recommended adjustments. In control mode, the only difference is that the AI solution skips the recommendation step and adjusts the extruder line specifications independently. The company expects that running this intelligent control system will return product to acceptable attributes faster. In the current extruder line, operators measure product attributes manually at defined intervals. If the Cheetos are out of spec, the operator makes adjustments based on guidelines or experience to return the product to acceptable quality. The problem: Infrequent sampling meant that the line could be producing out-of-spec Cheetos for a longer period of time without anyone realizing. The Project Bonsai solution will monitor the product almost continuously, using sensors to oversee characteristics such as length and bulk density. That way, it knows as soon as the product strays outside a defined range.

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Google plans to shut down Android Things, a stripped-down version of Android designed for smart home devices. The OS never really got off the ground, so this isn't all that much of a loss, but it is yet another entry in Google's expansive graveyard of shut-down projects. The Verge reports: The smart home project got its start in 2015 under the name Brillo, which was meant to provide the "underlying operating system for the internet of things." In 2016, Google revamped Brillo and relaunched the initiative as Android Things, which was likewise meant to run on products like connected speakers, security cameras, and routers. By relying on Android, the OS was supposed to be familiar to developers and easy to get started with. Then nothing happened. In 2018, some initial smart speakers and smart displays came out using the underlying OS. It seems no other companies were interested, because in February 2019, Google announced it was "refocusing" Android Things to cater specifically to smart speakers and smart displays. Nearly two years later, and Android Things is now on track to be shut down. The Android Things Console, which lets developers push updates to their devices, will stop accepting new non-commercial projects starting January 5th, 2021. A year later, on January 5th, 2022, "the console will be turned down completely and all project data will be permanently deleted." That essentially means developers have a year to wind down any Android Things projects they already have set up.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers from IBM Trusteer say they've uncovered a massive fraud operation that used a network of mobile device emulators to drain millions of dollars from online bank accounts in a matter of days. The scale of the operation was unlike anything the researchers have seen before. In one case, crooks used about 20 emulators to mimic more than 16,000 phones belonging to customers whose mobile bank accounts had been compromised. In a separate case, a single emulator was able to spoof more than 8,100 devices. The thieves then entered usernames and passwords into banking apps running on the emulators and initiated fraudulent money orders that siphoned funds out of the compromised accounts. Emulators are used by legitimate developers and researchers to test how apps run on a variety of different mobile devices. To bypass protections banks use to block such attacks, the crooks used device identifiers corresponding to each compromised account holder and spoofed GPS locations the device was known to use. The device IDs were likely obtained from the holders' hacked devices, although in some cases, the fraudsters gave the appearance they were customers who were accessing their accounts from new phones. The attackers were also able to bypass multi-factor authentication by accessing SMS messages.

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The socialist regime once cracked down on bitcoin miners. Now it's mining the digital asset itself. From a report: At a military base outside Caracas, Venezuela, state video footage shows officers in green fatigues cut a blue ribbon donned with a cluster of glossy balloons. Then, the men pry open the doors of a narrow, dimly-lit bunker. But the balloons weren't inaugurating a new weapons factory or training facility. They marked the opening of a new bitcoin mining farm. Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro needs cash to sustain his grip on power after muddling through one of the worst economic implosions seen in recent modern history in the Western Hemisphere. It appears that Maduro's last ditch effort to buoy Venezuela's shriveling economy is to dig deep for this digital asset and sell it for hard cash. "In a strategic alliance with private capital, the Bolivarian army inaugurated the first center for the production of digital assets at the Fuerte Tiuna facilities," said a spokesperson in footage published by state television in late November. Venezuelan General Domingo Antonio Hernandez Larez details the project in a cramped conference room, then he and other officers fondle a few S9 AntMiners, a type of specialized computer used to mine bitcoin, the volatile cryptocurrency whose price is scraping all-time-highs of just under $20,000 per coin. "This center of digital asset production will ensure self-financing sufficiency within the military," the Venezuelan state TV official explains. "These mining activities will be key for increasing revenues for the country."

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An international mission led by the World Health Organization (WHO) is expected to go to China in the first week of January to investigate the origins of the virus that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic, a member and diplomats told Reuters this week. From a report: The United States, which has accused China of having hidden the outbreak's extent, has called for a "transparent" WHO-led investigation and criticised its terms, which allowed Chinese scientists to do the first phase of preliminary research. China reported the first cases of a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, central China, to the WHO on Dec. 31 and closed a market where the novel coronavirus is believed to have emerged. Health ministers called on the WHO in May to identify the source of the virus and how it crossed the species barrier. Now a team of 12-15 international experts is finally preparing to go to Wuhan to examine evidence, including human and animal samples collected by Chinese researchers, and to build on their initial studies. Thea Fischer, a Danish member, said that the team would leave "just after New Year's" for a six-week mission, including two weeks of quarantine on arrival.

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A judge has ordered Apple to produce Tim Cook and Craig Federighi to testify for the Apple versus Epic lawsuit, and they must produce required documents before the next hearing. From a report: The Apple versus Epic lawsuit continues as publicly filed court documents tell us a bit more about the upcoming trial. Epic wants Apple to produce extensive documentation surrounding the App Store and its operations, but there has been some deliberation as to how extensive this data needs to be, and who will present it. The document filed states that Apple will have a large burden placed on them to gather much of what Epic is asking for. The court sides with Apple here stating that Epic need not ask for more amplifying data unless absolutely necessary. The most important part of the court filing is who's going to be made available to represent Apple. Epic has requested that Tim Cook and Craig Federighi be made available for the hearing. Apple says that Tim Cook will be available, but requests his deposition be limited to four hours. Apple also requested that Eric Neuenshwander, who runs the App Store and reports to Craig Federighi, be present instead.

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A bipartisan coalition of states sued Alphabet's Google Thursday alleging broad antitrust violations in the online search market, marking the third U.S. case against the search giant in two months. From a report: The lawsuit, led by Colorado, Iowa and other states, marks the latest escalation of the antitrust battle against Google. It comes a day after 10 Republican state attorneys general led by Texas sued the company for anticompetitive practices, and follows an October complaint by the Justice Department. "Combined with the other recent lawsuits filed against Google, never before have so many states and the federal government come together to challenge a company with such power," Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said a statement. "Google has more data on consumers, and more variety of information, than perhaps any entity in history." The lawsuit, filed by 38 attorneys general, accuses Google of illegally monopolizing internet search and search advertising through a series of anticompetitive contracts and conduct, hurting consumers and advertisers in the process.

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Computer programs that automate online tasks, called bots, have aligned with the coronavirus pandemic and low inventories of hot products to create a perfect storm of holiday disappointment -- or opportunity, depending on your perspective. From a report: On Black Friday, when it launched a deal on the console, Walmart.com says it blocked more than 20 million bot attempts in the sale's first 30 minutes. Target says it's constantly tracking and blocking bots, focusing on high-demand products such as the PS5. One British retailer called Very said it canceled at least 1,000 game console orders after it realized they were placed by bots. Using shopping bots to buy these products is perfectly legal in the United States, despite flustering retailers and stoking annoyance for customers like Coleman. Some bot operators are modern scalpers, in it to make money by forcing Santa to pay market prices. Others are computer-savvy shoppers now turning to bots out of desperation to fill their own gift lists. Shopping bots aren't new, but their use is growing fast. Deployed by people who buy and resell tickets, high-end sneakers and designer fashion, they're now expanding into other categories where demand outstrips supply -- including grocery delivery slots at the height of the pandemic. Imperva, a cybersecurity firm, says that among its clients, "bad bots" accounted for 24.1 percent of all traffic in 2019 -- up from 20.4 percent in 2018. Bots are only one part of the PS5 crunch -- there have even been daring heists. But stopping the use of bots is easier said than done in an Internet economy that connects so many different interests: companies that want to make highly sought-after products and early adopters who will do anything to get them.

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Makers of cars and electronic devices from TVs to smartphones are sounding alarm bells about a global shortage of chips, which is causing manufacturing delays as consumer demand bounces back from the coronavirus crisis. From a report: The problem has several causes, industry executives and analysts say, including bulk-buying by U.S. sanctions-hit Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies, a fire at a chip plant in Japan, coronavirus lockdowns in Southeast Asia, and a strike in France. More fundamentally, however, there has been under-investment in 8-inch chip manufacturing plants owned mostly by Asian firms, which means they have struggled to ramp up production as demand for 5G phones, laptops and cars picked up faster than expected. "For the whole electronics industry, we've been experiencing a shortage of components," said Donny Zhang, CEO of Shenzhen-based sourcing company Sand and Wave, who said he faced delays in obtaining a microcontroller unit that was key to a smart headphone product he was working on. "We were originally planning to complete production in one month, but now it looks like we'll need to do it in two." A source at a Japanese electronics component supplier said it was seeing shortages of WiFi and Bluetooth chips and was expecting delays of more than 10 weeks.

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Google won European Union approval for its $2.1 billion takeover of health tracker Fitbit, days after regulators proposed tougher rules to curb powerful technology firms' push into new services. From a report: The European Commission said Google's pledge to maintain access for rival health and fitness apps and device makers for 10 years removed its concerns about the U.S. tech giant's move into health data and devices. Smaller rivals previously complained that the company's promises might not go far enough to stop Google shutting off access in future to rival products or services. "The commitments will determine how Google can use the data collected for ad purposes, how interoperability between competing wearables and Android will be safeguarded and how users can continue to share health and fitness data, if they choose to," Margrethe Vestager, the EU's antitrust chief, said in a statement Thursday. Approval comes in a harsh climate when Google and others are facing mounting scrutiny of acquisitions that help them push into new areas. Google announced its plans to buy Fitbit in November 2019, describing the bid for the smartwatch maker as a boost to its lagging hardware business.

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In Huntsville, Alabama, there is a room with green walls and a green ceiling. Dangling down the center is a fishing line attached to a motor mounted to the ceiling, which moves a procession of guns tied to the translucent line. From a report: The staff at Arcarithm bought each of the 10 best-selling firearm models in the U.S.: Rugers, Glocks, Sig Sauers. Pistols and long guns are dangled from the line. The motor rotates them around the room, helping a camera mounted to a mobile platform photograph them from multiple angles. "It's just like a movie set," said Arcarithm president and CEO Randy E. Riley. This process creates about 5,000 images of each gun floating ethereally. Arcarithm's computer programmers then replace the green backdrop with different environments, like fields, forests, and city streets. They add rain or snow or fog or sun. A program then randomly distorts the images. The result is 30,000 to 50,000 images of the same gun, from multiple angles, in different synthetic settings and of varying degrees of visibility. The point of creating this vast portfolio of digital gun art is to feed an algorithm made to detect a firearm as soon as a security camera catches it being drawn by synthetically creating tens of thousands of ways each gun may appear. Arcarithm is one of several companies developing automated active shooter detection technology in the hopes of selling it to schools, hotels, entertainment venues and the owners of any location that could be the site of one of America's 15,000 annual gun murders and 29,000 gun injuries. Among the other sellers are Omnilert, a longtime vendor of safety notification software, and newcomers ZeroEyes, Defendry, and Athena Securities. Some cities employ a surveillance system of acoustic sensors to instantly detect gunshots. These companies promise to do one better and save precious minutes by alerting police or security personnel before the first shot is fired.

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Alphabet's Google waived a 1.1 billion-pound loan ($1.5 billion) to DeepMind in 2019 after the U.K.-based artificial intelligence lab continued to ramp up the scale of its research and development. From a report: Revenue jumped 158% in 2019, DeepMind said in a financial filing this week. Sales were 265.5 million pounds, up from 102.8 million pounds a year earlier. Its losses also widened, increasing 1.4% to 476.6 million pounds. DeepMind's parent has agreed to continue funding the company for at least a year after the report's approval. Alphabet's Google Ireland unit waived repayments and interest from the loan to help cover DeepMind's losses. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 in a 400 million-pound acquisition that gave the Silicon Valley search giant access to cutting edge AI research. DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis's goal is to produce general-purpose intelligence that can solve an array of problems. It develops products used by its parent company -- like its system for making data centers more energy efficient and a program to improve the accuracy of travel times on Google Maps -- as well as AI with broader applications.

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Last week, some Goodreads users received a disappointing message: The popular book tracking website is disabling access to its API for users who haven't used the product in more than 30 days. The company says it "plans to retire these tools" altogether and that, as of December 8, it will no longer issue new keys. It's unclear when or if Goodreads will close off its API to active users. From a report: "When I found out, I was pretty upset," says Karen Ellett, a software developer in South Carolina who uses the Goodreads API to power a private tool that tracks book series. The tool, which she had hoped to eventually release for other people to use, keeps track of new releases in book series she reads, which is a function Goodreads doesn't currently offer. When a new book gets added to the series, Ellett's tool updates automatically, so she doesn't have to go looking for it on her own when she's ready to dive back into the series. Since she's read 172 books this year, it's not easy for her to mentally juggle all the new additions she wants to get to on her own. "I've put so many hours into developing this tool not just for myself, but with an eye towards it being utilized by other people. I'd say I was probably about 70 to 80% done, and now there's just no point," she says. As Goodreads is a stagnant product that has barely improved its functionality and features since it was acquired by Amazon in 2013, thousands of readers with basic coding skills use the Goodreads API to power their own better features and tools. On a thread about the change for Goodreads Developers, one user says the Discord book recommendations bot he was in the process of building suddenly stopped working. Another says his tool, which analyzes statistics related to the authors on a Goodreads user's "read" list, will be shut down, nullifying countless hours of work he put into the feature. Ellett still uses the API daily, so her access to the API hasn't been shut down -- yet. She heard about it from a friend who forwarded the email to her. Many Goodreads API users complain that the communication from Goodreads has been terrible, with people only hearing about the change from intermittent users whose access was suddenly terminated.

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Facebook is stepping up its campaign against Apple's privacy changes with a second full-page newspaper ad today. This new ad claims Apple's iOS 14 privacy changes "will change the internet as we know it," and force websites and blogs "to start charging you subscription fees" or add in-app purchases due to a lack of personalized ads. From a report: It follows a similar full-page newspaper ad in the The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Washington Post yesterday. Apple is planning to make changes to iOS 14 early next year that will require developers to ask for permission to gather data and track users across mobile apps and websites on an iPhone or iPad. Apple revealed how iOS 14 users will be prompted to opt into tracking in apps this week, noting that developers like Facebook can explain to users why they should allow tracking within the prompt. These changes will impact Facebook's lucrative ad business, but the social networking giant is framing them as something far larger that could impact small businesses. Unsurprisingly, Apple doesn't agree. "We believe that this is a simple matter of standing up for our users," said an Apple spokesperson in response to Facebook's first full-page newspaper ad yesterday. "Users should know when their data is being collected and shared across other apps and websites -- and they should have the choice to allow that or not."

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Book publishing in 2020 was a story of how much an industry can change and how much it can, or wants to, remain the same. From a report: "A lot of what has happened this year -- if it were a novel, I would say that it had a little too much plot," said Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp. Three narratives ran through the book world for much of the year: an industry pressed to acknowledge that the status quo was unacceptable, an industry offering comfort and enlightenment during traumatic times, and an industry ever more consolidated around the power of Penguin Random House and Amazon.com. To its benefit and to its dismay, publishing was drawn into the events of the moment. The pandemic halted and threatened to wipe out a decade of growth for independent bookstores, forced the postponement of countless new releases and led to countless others being forgotten. The annual national convention, BookExpo, was called off and may be gone permanently after show organizers Reed Exhibitions announced they were "retiring" it. The industry had long regarded itself as a facilitator of open expression and high ideals, but in 2020 debates over diversity and #MeToo highlighted blind spots about race and gender and challenged the reputations of everyone from poetry publishers to Oprah Winfrey, from book critics to the late editor of Ernest Hemingway. Employees themselves helped take the lead: They staged protests in support of Black Lives Matters and walked off the job at Hachette Book Group after the publisher announced it had acquired Woody Allen's memoir, which Hachette soon dropped. Through it all, books managed to sell, keeping a steady pace at a time when film and theater, among other industries, faced dire questions about their future.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: In his final weeks in office before Joe Biden's inauguration, President Donald Trump is weighing granting clemency to Ross Ulbricht, the founder and former administrator of the world's most famous darknet drug market, Silk Road, The Daily Beast has learned. According to three people familiar with the matter, the White House counsel's office has had documents related to Ulbricht's case under review, and Trump was recently made aware of the situation and the pleas of the Silk Road founder's allies. Two of these sources say the president has at times privately expressed some sympathy for Ulbricht's situation and has been considering his name, among others, for his next round of commutations and pardons before the Jan. 20 inauguration of his 2020 Democratic opponent. It is unclear if Trump has arrived at a final decision yet, but Ulbricht has gained some influential backers in the president's political and social orbit. Behind the scenes, he has the support of some presidential advisers, as well as criminal justice reform advocates with close ties to the administration and Trump family, including Alice Johnson, according to people with knowledge of the matter. "I've had documents forwarded to my contacts in the White House as early as February," activist Weldon Angelos, a former music producer and ex-federal inmate, said in a brief interview on Tuesday evening. "In the beginning of the year, [Ulbricht's] family had reached out to us for our support, and my organization and I have endorsed his full commutation, and I am hopeful that President Trump will commute his sentence in its entirety. This case has perhaps more support than I've seen in any case of this kind."

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schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Since that time, according to The Planetary Society's Casey Dreier, NASA has spent $23.7 billion developing the Orion spacecraft. This does not include primary costs for the vehicle's Service Module, which provides power and propulsion, as it is being provided by the European Space Agency. For this money, NASA has gotten a bare-bones version of Orion that flew during the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission in 2014. The agency has also gotten the construction of an Orion capsule -- which also does not have a full life support system -- that will be used during the uncrewed Artemis I mission due to be flown in 12 to 24 months. So over its lifetime, and for $23.7 billion, the Orion program has produced: - Development of Orion spacecraft - Exploration Flight Test-1 basic vehicle - The Orion capsule to be used for another test flight - Work on capsules for subsequent missions Obviously, that is not nothing. But it is far from a lot, even for a big government program. To see how efficiently this money could theoretically have been spent, let's use an extreme example. SpaceX is generally considered one of the most efficient space companies. Founded in 2002, the company has received funding from NASA, the Department of Defense, and private investors. Over its history, we can reliably estimate that SpaceX has expended a total of $16 billion to $20 billion on all of its spaceflight endeavors. Consider what that money has bought: - Development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy rockets - Development of Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon, and Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft - Development of Merlin, Kestrel, and Raptor rocket engines - Build-out of launch sites at Vandenberg (twice), Kwajalein Atoll, Cape Canaveral, and Kennedy Space Center - 105 successful launches to orbit - 20 missions to supply International Space Station, two crewed flights - Development of vertical take off, vertical landing, rapid reuse for first stages - Starship and Super Heavy rocket development program - Starlink Internet program (with 955 satellites on orbit, SpaceX is largest satellite operator in the world) To sum up, SpaceX delivered all of that for billions of dollars less than what NASA has spent on the Orion program since its inception.

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