By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Moon Traffic
Lots of countries are making moonshots in some capacity. In the past two years, there were 12 attempts to send a mission to the Moon, about half of which were the work of private companies. Over the next few years, depending on funding, about 10 to 20 missions are bound for the Moon. That’s obviously short of the satellite traffic in Earth’s orbit. However, we are getting close to the point of being a bit concerned about traffic coordination in lunar orbit, particularly because the Moon is much smaller than Earth. A new study found that if there were 50 satellites in lunar orbit, each one of those satellites would have to maneuver four times per year on average to avoid a potential crash. At that distance from Earth, there are expensive and valuable fuel resources to be concerned about. I will say, “I’m pretty worried about all the traffic en route to the Moon” is one of those sci-fi sentences I’m somewhat delighted may become a reality in my lifetime.
Mariel Borowitz and Brian Gunter, The Conversation
Fresh Out Of The Showroom
New York City’s transit bought 378 new subway cars from Kawasaki Heavy Industries in a $1.5 billion contract for the new R268 model cars. The subway cars will be made in Nebraska, and delivery will come between 2028 and 2030. The new cars will be based on the specifications of the R211 cars already in use in New York’s subway, with the transit agency buying up 1,610 of that model to date. New York’s dealings with Kawasaki Heavy Industries go back to 1982. The state is Kawasaki Heavy’s main market in North America, and this most recent order will mean that over 50 percent of the rolling stock in the city will be from Kawasaki Heavy within the next few years.
Egypt
Tomorrow is the big day for the Grand Egypt Museum, which holds its opening ceremony 30 years after plans were first announced. For years, the century-old Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square in Cairo has simply been unable to accommodate the number of tourists interested in the globally renowned collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts. The issue has prompted plans to build a massive installation near the Giza complex of the pyramids, about 45 minutes outside of town. The long-awaited event will include the official opening of the Tutankhamun Gallery. The museum is expected to make most of its money from tourists while giving the locals a comparatively inexpensive opportunity to see the history, with tickets costing 1,270 Egyptian pounds (about $27) for a tourist but just 200 Egyptian pounds (about US$4.25) for Egyptians.
Melissa Gronlund, The Art Newspaper
NHL
Kenny Albert is the play-by-play announcer for the TNT television network and is one of the rare announcers in the field who call for all four major professional sports leagues. As the fall calendar heats up — we hope everyone had a pleasant Sports Equinox earlier this week — Albert is putting up the kind of air mileage typically only seen by SR-71 pilots, including a 13,565-mile journey that took him from London’s NFL game to Las Vegas to Orchard Park, then back to Vegas. He is on the heels of a record, too. In June, he passed his father, Marv Albert’s 1,481 nationally broadcast booth appearances across the four American sports. Today, Albert the Younger has 1,508 national booth appearances, of which include 1,132 NBA games, 297 NFL games, 34 NHL games and 18 MLB games. That’s within striking distance of the current record, held by the retired Dick Stockton with 1,544 games called (715 NFL, 615 NBA, 191 MLB, 23 NHL).
Gas
Three companies — Linde Plc, Air Liquide SA and Air Products and Chemicals Inc. — control 70 percent of the global market for industrial gases, a $120 billion industry. Their manufacturing work is very electricity-intensive, and a new report identified the industrial gas sector as one of the largest consumers of electricity in the world. The annual electricity demand of the three companies in 2024 — 42.5 terawatt-hours for Linde, 23 terawatt-hours for Air Liquide and 17 terawatt-hours for Air Products — puts them in the same category as oil majors and tech giants. The industry’s air-separation units and compressors are singlehandedly responsible for two percent of carbon dioxide emissions in China and the United States.
DUI
California is in the midst of a driving under the influence crisis after making decades of progress in cutting back on drunk driving. Alcohol-related deaths on California roads have risen 50 percent in the past decade, growing twice as fast as the rest of the country. Per year, over 1,300 people die in collisions where alcohol was a factor, many of which are the result of repeat DUI offenders getting back behind the wheel with California’s generally lax DUI laws. Drivers can’t be charged with a felony until their fourth DUI within 10 years, while just two DUIs with get you that charge in many other states. Furthermore, you lose your license for three years after your third DUI in California. That is compared to eight years in New Jersey and permanently in Connecticut. The law is also more rarely enforced; DUI arrests statewide dropped from 366,834 in 1990 to 124,141 as of 2019.
Robert Lewis and Lauren Helper, CalMatters
Anime
The annual report from the Association of Japanese Animations is out, and the nation’s industry hit a record 3.8 trillion yen (US$25 billion) in 2024, up 14.8 percent year over year. Yet again, the industry is seeing most of its growth overseas, with international markets accounting for 56 percent of the total revenue for anime. Absent international income, growth would have been flat since 2023, and it was only in 2020 that overseas sales surprisingly passed domestic sales.
A very fun Sunday edition this past weekend talking to my friend and former FiveThirtyEight colleague Christine Laskowski, who produced an enormously delightful and fascinating history podcast diving deep into the era of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora called T and J: A Roman Era Love Story. I have been a big fan of the show, the series just wrapped up, you should check out the interview and the show out, it’s a great binge-listen in my experience, it’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Picturing Jenny riding a subway car certainly refreshes my image of that song.