The longest — and last — full moon of the year will appear on Monday night and peak on Tuesday.
December’s full moon, also known as the Cold Moon and Long Night Moon, will reach peak illumination at 7:33 p.m. ET on Tuesday, according to NASA. It will look like a full moon until Thursday morning. The Old Farmer’s Almanac details specific moonrise times for different ZIP codes across the United States.
A formation of geese fly in for a landing on Stoney Creek with the last full moon of 2022 behind them. The Farmers Almanac calls it the Cold Moon. December 9, 2022.
Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Where does December’s full moon get its name from?
December’s full moon gets its Cold Moon moniker from Mohawk traditions, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. The name is based on the frigid conditions of the time of year.
The full moon is also called the Long Night Moon because December’s full moon occurs near the winter solstice, which has the longest night of the year. This year’s solstice was on Dec. 21.
“The full moon takes a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite to the low sun, so the moon will be above the horizon longer than at other times of the year,” according to NASA.
Other names for December’s full moon include Drift Clearing Moon, Frost Exploding Trees Moon, Moon of the Popping Trees, Hoar Frost Moon, Snow Moon, Winter Maker Moon, Moon When the Deer Shed Their Antlers and Little Spirit Moon, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. Ancient pagans in Europe called the December full Moon the Moon Before Yule.
Next month’s full moon is dubbed the Wolf Moon. It will peak on Jan. 25.
Known as the “Wolf Moon”, this full Moon is the first that occurs after the Winter Solstice, in the northern hemisphere, where the nights are still very long, or summer, in the southern hemisphere.
Alex Pena/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Is the moon ever full on Christmas?
December’s full moon does fall on Christmas sometimes, but it’s a rare occasion. The last full moon to peak on Christmas was in 2015.
Before that, there hadn’t been one since 1977.
Astronomers say the next Christmas full moon won’t be until 2034.
Aliza Chasan is a digital producer at 60 Minutes and CBSNews.com. She has previously written for outlets including PIX11 News, The New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo. Aliza covers trending news, often focusing on crime and politics.
Thanks for reading CBS NEWS.
Create your free account or log in for more features.
Happy December, Polygon readers! It’s the last weekend before the Christmas holiday, and we’ve got a whole sack full of exciting new releases on streaming and VOD for you!
This week, Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire, the first installment of Zack Snyder’s epic space opera starring Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service) finally comes to Netflix along with Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Gareth Edwards’ sci-fi action thriller The Creator finally comes to Hulu, and the black comedy thriller Saltburn arrives on Prime Video. There’s plenty of new movies available to rent this week as well, including The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, and much more.
Here’s everything new to watch this weekend!
New on Netflix
Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Image: Netflix
Genre: Epic space opera Run time: 2h 15m Director: Zack Snyder Cast: Sofia Boutella, Charlie Hunnam, Michiel Huisman
Zack Snyder returns to Netflix with an all-new, Star Wars- and Seven Samurai-inspired space opera in the form of Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire. Set in a far-off galaxy besieged by a brutal interplanetary empire, the film follows the story of a soldier-turned-farmer who must recruit a band of warriors to fight alongside her against the regime she once served. Also, Anthony Hopkins shows up as a robot and Doona Bae (Cloud Atlas) has cool definitely-not-lightsaber butcher swords. Neat!
The best that can be said about Snyder is that he’s at least capable of a kind of manic brouhaha that’s not unbecoming in this kind of genre filmmaking. Despite the lack of character or emotion in his films, he certainly can be one of the best filmmakers at capturing the pure excess of a piece of lurid fantasy art, or the distinct flair of a Frank Miller drawing. But in Child of Fire, the results couldn’t even be called stylish. The CGI seems to degenerate as the running time goes on. The production and costume design had this Dune agnostic bumping that film up half a star on Letterboxd. And Tom Holkenborg’s score sounds like Space Enya.
Maestro
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Photo: Jason McDonald/Netflix
Genre: Biographical drama Run time: 2h 9m Director: Bradley Cooper Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bradley Cooper
Bradley Cooper directs and stars in this biographical drama about the life of the acclaimed American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his complicated relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre.
Maestro takes on new shades when compared with Cooper’s directorial debut, that Star Is Born remake. It’s the inverse of Maestro in a lot of ways. In A Star Is Born, singer Jackson Maine (Cooper) sees something magical in Ally (Lady Gaga), and struggles to cope as they fall in love and her career eclipses his. Conversely, Maestro is built around Leonard Bernstein’s marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), who Bernstein is captivated by and devoted to — at least, part of him is. Felicia, who first appears on camera in a black-and-white sequence, illuminates the screen with her talents and ambitions, then is ironically suffocated as Cooper widens Maestro’s aspect ratio and fills it with color. Leonard’s ambition, his dueling appetites, and his affairs with men like David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer) edge her out and dim her world.
Operation Napoleon
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Image: Magnet Releasing/Magnolia
Genre: Historical thriller Run time: 1h 42m Director: Óskar Þór Axelsson Cast: Vivian Ólafsdóttir, Jack Fox, Iain Glen
An Icelandic lawyer (Vivian Ólafsdóttir) finds herself drawn into a deadly international conspiracy after her brother accidentally stumbles upon a German World War II plane buried beneath the snow. Hunted by ruthless criminals and a unrelenting CIA director (Iain Glen), she’ll have to get to the heart of the mystery if she has any hope of surviving.
New on Hulu
The Creator
Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu
Image: 20th Century Studios
Genre: Sci-fi action Run time: 2h 15m Director: Gareth Edwards Cast: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe
John David Washington (Tenet) stars in Rogue One director Gareth Edwards’ latest sci-fi adventure as an undercover operative in the far-future searching for the mysterious creator of a rogue-artificial intelligence. After being entrusted with the care of a human-like robot named “Alphie” (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), the pair embark on a journey in search of answers and salvation.
The Creator would be a wonderful video game. I mean that earnestly — video games are terrific for interacting with lore, with the bits and bobs of world-building that all storytellers spend years developing, but leave as subtext in the story proper. That can also be true of video games, but games of larger scope often flesh out their virtual worlds with said lore, which players are often free to roam and engage with. There are all sorts of ways that lore can become text — optional conversations with characters, diary and book excerpts to read, video or audio ephemera, all ambient and non-compulsory, a substrate where the player can find meaning whether the main narrative is fulfilling or not. The Creator is a fully realized future in the service of a rote story and flat characters that only gesture in compelling directions; I’d rather not bother with that story at all.
New on Prime Video
Saltburn
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
Image: Prime Video
Genre: Psychological thriller Run time: 2h 11m Director: Emerald Fennell Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Archie Madekwe
‘What if The Talented Mr. Ripley, but set in a palatial Oxford-family estate with young adults in the mid-2000s?”
That’s essentially the premise of this black comedy about class and privilege starring Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) and Jacob Elordi (Euphoria), from Promising Young Woman filmmaker Emerald Fennell.
Genre: Surrealist tragicomedy horror Run time: 2h 59m Director: Ari Aster Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan
A24 horror maestro Ari Aster returns with a different kind of project in this horror-comedy about a man confronting his fears after the death of his mother.
Genre: Biographical drama Run time: 1h 40m Director: Guy Nattiv Cast: Helen Mirren, Camille Cottin, Liev Schreiber
Helen Mirren stars in this biographical drama about Golda Meir, the 4th Prime Minister of Israel, and her role during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
New to rent
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Photo: Murray Close/Lionsgate
Genre: Dystopian action Run time: 2h 37m Director: Francis Lawrence Cast: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Peter Dinklage
Francis Lawrence returns to the world of The Hunger Games to tell the story of the early years of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), who would go on to become the president of Panem and the nemesis of Katniss Everdeen.
Set 60 years before the events of the first film, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes recalls the fateful meeting between Coriolanus and Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a tribute from District 12 who would leave a profound impact on his life and worldview.
Collins’ book and Lawrence’s movie don’t redo the action of the Hunger Games events; they dissect them, then force us to sit on the Capitol side of the equation. They demand to know why we were even drawn to the love triangle, the pretty dresses, and the themed arenas in the first place. We’ve always been the spectators, after all, watching Katniss’ story from a safe distance. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes shows us what happens if we get too carried away by propaganda, luxury, and the promise of safety. In that way, it’s a fitting end to the franchise — and a fitting end to the way the genre evolved into a beast of its own.
Trolls: Band Together
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: DreamWorks/Universal
Genre: Adventure comedy Run time: 1h 31m Directors: Walt Dohrn, Tim Heitz Cast: Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Kenan Thompson
The Trolls have returned, and they’re getting the band back together! After Branch’s brother Floyd is kidnapped, he’ll have to team up with Poppy to reunite with his other brothers in order to find the culprit and save the day.
Thanksgiving
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Photo: Pief Weyman/Sony Pictures
Genre: Slasher horror Run time: 1h 46m Director: Eli Roth Cast: Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Gina Gershon
Just in time for Christmas, Eli Roth is back with a brand new holiday-themed slasher! After a tragic Black Friday riot, the quiet town of Plymouth, Massachusetts is terrorized by a Thanksgiving-inspired killer wearing a ghoulish John Carver mask.
Comedic slashers where both halves complement each other are rare, even among the genre’s most entertaining offerings. Movies like Totally Killer or Happy Death Day are too funny and lighthearted to ever really earn a genuine scare, while a movie like House of 1000 Corpses is so dark and gross that the humor isn’t likely to land on a first viewing. Few movies have ever struck that balance quite as well as Craven’s four Scream movies. Thanksgiving doesn’t quite reach that series’ meteoric heights, but it comes far closer than anything else in recent years — including the Scream franchise itself.
Silent Night
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Photo: Carlos Latapi/Lionsgate
Genre: Action thriller Run time: 1h 44m Director: John Woo Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Scott Mescudi, Harold Torres
After nearly 20 years, action movie legend John Woo has returned with a Christmas-themed revenge thriller starring Joel Kinnaman as a vigilante who embarks on a mission to exact vengeance on the gang who murdered his son in a Christmas Eve drive-by. Polygon spoke to Woo about the process that went into this film and why he was first attracted to the unique project.
Anatomy of a Fall
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
This Palme d’Or-winning French courtroom drama follows the story of a writer trying to prove her innocence following the mysterious death of her husband outside of their home. Was it murder or was it suicide? Beyond a simple interrogation of guilt, the film is a psychological thriller that delves deep into the complicated circumstances behind the couple’s relationship.
Dream Scenario
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: A24
Genre: Horror comedy Run time: 1h 42m Director: Kristoffer Borgli Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera
Nicolas Cage (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) continues his streak of meta self-referential projects in this horror-comedy about a mild-mannered biology professor who inexplicably becomes famous overnight after appearing in the dreams of people around the world.
Dream Scenario’s vague, nebulous type of fame gives Borgli an avenue to comment on celebrity and its price without taking a specific stand. He’s just exploring the cost of being highly visible, being up for endless interpretation by total strangers, and being disconnected in the public eye from any actual real-world intentions or actions. Once Paul starts deliberately taking a more active role in people’s dreams, the script takes a Charlie Kaufman-esque approach, playing with the ideas around so-called cancel culture as part of the world of instant fame. He also keeps the visuals refreshing and interesting, fully veering into dream-sequence horror, with enjoyably weird results.
NASA is taking steps to prepare for future long-term occupation on the Moon by seeking input from the lunar and scientific communities on ways to convert lunar soil and other naturally-occurring compounds into oxygen.
The nation’s leading space organization made an announcement Monday asking for input on In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) technologies, which in this case means using materials found on the moon, the vast majority of which are moon dust, to produce fuel, oxygen, water and other resources human beings might use or consume. These processes may one day make it possible for human beings to enjoy a sustainable presence on the moon or other planets without the need to shuttle resources to and from Earth.
NASA issued a Request for Information (RFI) for ISRU technologies which essentially allows them to start officially gathering information from outside parties for their future Lunar Infrastructure Foundational Technologies demonstration, also known as LIFT-1. LIFT-1 can be described as the foundation for the next phase of American lunar occupation, NASA’s officially designated program to put American boots back on the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in December of 1972.
“Additional LIFT-1 objectives may include demonstrating new landing technologies, surface operations, and scalable power generation in the Moon’s South Pole region,” a NASA press release said. “With the RFI, NASA is asking for input from the lunar community to inform an integrated approach inclusive of launch, landing, and demonstration of surface infrastructure technologies as part of a subscale ISRU demonstration.”
One of the many issues standing in the way of human occupation on the Moon or anywhere else beyond Earth is that it’s very difficult, expensive and time consuming to bring enough resources for everybody. Launching a rocket ship from Earth costs multiple millions of dollars no matter how you slice it and every pound on board makes it monumentally more expensive. As such, long term space occupation isn’t really practical or feasible without ISRU technology.
NASA leadership described ISRU technology development as a crucial necessity for the longevity of our astronauts, their equipment, and the possibility of one day creating permanent human settlements on the Moon or beyond.
“Using in-situ resources is essential to making a sustained presence farther from Earth possible. Just as we need consumables and infrastructure to live and work on our home planet, we’ll need similar support systems on the Moon for crew and robots to operate safely and productively,” said Dr. Prasun Desai, acting associate administrator of the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
NASA has already showcased certain ISRU technologies, most notably MOXIE, a small instrument onboard the Mars Perseverance Rover which successfully converted atmospheric carbon dioxide into usable oxygen on April 20, 2021. This type of conversion is useful on a planet like Mars which has an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide. However, the moon has virtually no atmosphere according to NASA, so technology must be created to extract oxygen from naturally occurring minerals in the ground.
NASA has several investments in ISRU technology already in the way of prospecting, extraction and mining initiatives as well as several outstanding academic and industry partnerships but the RFI issued Monday, which is open until December 18, is specifically looking for information on chemical processes capable of harnessing resources from lunar dust and soil.
“Chemical and thermal process developments may provide options to break down naturally occurring minerals and compounds found on the Moon and convert them to propellant or human consumables,” the press release said. “Other potential longer-term applications could lead to extraterrestrial metal processing and construction of lunar surface structures using resources found on the Moon.”
Another representative from NASA leadership said in a written statement that the idea of harnessing oxygen and other usable resources from the ground has been theorized about for a long time but the idea may soon be utilized for real life space travel.
“An ISRU technology demonstration approach has been a topic of discussion within the Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative and Consortium communities for several years,” said Niki Werkheiser, director of Technology Maturation in STMD. “This RFI is the next phase to make it a reality.”
The LIFT-1 RFI can be found here and is open for responses through Dec. 18 at 5:00 p.m. EST. Additionally. NASA will host an industry forum on Monday, Nov. 13 at 1 pm EST.
Early on in Martin Scorsese’s historical drama Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s a quiet moment between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the woman he will eventually marry, Osage heiress Molly (Lily Gladstone). The absorbing way Scorsese stages the drama makes it clear that this relationship will not end well, but the soundtrack is strangely twinkling, as if this were the start of a grand romance. Then the lyrics kicked in:
…karma is my boyfriend Karma is a god Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend Karma’s a relaxing thought Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?
I was not, in fact, hearing the late, great Robbie Robertson’s score for Killers of the Flower Moon — I was getting sound bleed from Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour playing next door. And I would continue to get that bleed throughout Killers, because while “Karma” marks the end of The Eras Tour’s set list, the film immediately started running again. At 169 minutes long, it’s only 37 minutes shorter than Scorsese’s epic, one of the few currently playing movies that get anywhere near the drama’s 206-minute run time.
Through conversations with friends and colleagues, posts on social media, and collected observations of theater layouts and showtimes, I learned that I am far from alone. The sonic power of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is bleeding into Martin Scorsese’s meditative masterpiece in a number of multiplexes, creating a miasma of cinematic emotion that neither artist could anticipate.
Image via X
On the one hand, this is extremely annoying. Part of the reason we go to the theater is because it supposedly allows us to experience movies the way the filmmakers intended, optimally presented in a space that’s free of distractions. Killers of the Flower Moon wrestles with a horrifying true chapter of American history. It’s a quiet and mannered film, perhaps more so than Scorsese fans might expect. Hearing “Blank Space” while the Osage people are getting systematically murdered can feel disrespectful at worst, incongruously funny at best.
And the sonic overlap itself is kind of amusing. Two wildly different reasons to go to the movies are running together, as “Wildest Dreams” is faintly heard over wide-angle shots of the Oklahoma plains. It’s an offline version of the online media environment, where context collapse is normal, and random juxtaposition can yield darkly comedic results.
I didn’t particularly love watching Killers of the Flower Moon this way, but I didn’t hate it, either. It was like a series of intrusive thoughts I learned to tune out while contemplating something I found engaging and worthwhile. There I was, ruminating on the parasitic nature of white entrepreneurs on Native lands, and unbidden, I would think of that one YouTube video where a guy who did a viral Gollum voice covered “I Knew You Were Trouble,” because I heard a few bars of the song leaking in from the theater next to me during a quieter moment. But I also grew up in a noisy home, so I can rely on muscle memory here.
I don’t think anyone should deliberately try to see Killers of the Flower Moon this way. I don’t believe I got any insight from this aural serendipity that I wouldn’t have gotten had I watched each movie in a more soundproof environment. Someone else might! There could be real TheDark Side of the Rainbow/Another Brick in the WALL-E potential here. Maybe when both movies are available digitally, someone will make a “Killers of the Taylor Moon” cut. Accidentally, in theaters, though? Not ideal.
But I don’t think it’s a reason to stay home. Like The Eras Tour, Killers of the Flower Moon deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible. The minor inconvenience of occasionally overhearing a track from 1989 (or, God forbid, Reputation) is worth the trade-off.
Perhaps theater managers who read this piece — feel free to pass it along if you know any — will take this kind of sound-bleed issue into account, and work to make it less of a normal occurrence. Exhibitors, please take Taylor’s words into account: You need to calm down. You’re being too loud.
Sean and Amanda discuss Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour epicKillers of the Flower Moon and everything that it entails. They explore the adaptation of the David Grann book and how Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth shifted the perspective in the film (10:00), Leonardo DiCaprio’s and Robert De Niro’s repeated collaborations with Scorsese (23:00), the spellbinding performance of Lily Gladstone (48:00), the ways the film reflects on themes Scorsese has explored repeatedly (38:00), how it slots into the late Scorsese oeuvre (1:27:00), its chances at the Oscars (1:30:00), and more.
Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner
There’s a story that crops up on the margins of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon that’s fascinated me for years. It’s the story of the Osage writer John Joseph Mathews, who, in the 1920s and ’30s, became one of a hauntingly small number of American Indian authors to receive national attention for their work. Decades before modern culture rediscovered the so-called Osage murders—first through Grann’s mega-bestselling book, then through Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation, opening this week to radiant reviews—Mathews wrote about them. And not only did he write about them, he lived through the time when they happened; observed their effects; was shaped by them, to a degree. Mathews in turn played a significant role in shaping the future course of Native American literature. It would be fitting if the popularity of Killers of the Flower Moon led more people to rediscover the work of this important, and semi-forgotten, American writer.
Mathews was a strange, brilliant, phenomenally contradictory figure. American literature has a way of lifting up writers whose psyches don’t entirely cohere, as if they’re assembled—like the United States itself—from mismatched parts. Think of Emily Dickinson: the titanic ambition of the work, the mundane anonymity of the life. Or Ernest Hemingway: the bullying strength layered atop weakness, the rejection of sentimentality shapeshifting into a new form of sentimentality in and of itself.
Mathews belongs to this lineage. Whatever you picture when you hear “early 20th-century American Indian writer” almost certainly isn’t him. For one thing, he was only one-eighth Osage, from his father’s grandmother; the rest of his ancestors were white. He was the son of a rich banker, yet he chose to live alone for long stretches of his life in a solitary stone cabin, which he called “The Blackjacks,” in Osage territory in northern Oklahoma. He spent his early life on a series of globetrotting adventures—he flew planes during World War I, studied at Oxford, hunted big game in Africa, got married in Switzerland—yet he settled down while still in his 30s to a withdrawn and quiet writing life. He was a lifelong Anglophile, and his manners were often compared to those of an English gentleman, yet he spent decades collecting and preserving tribal legends and tales. Above all, perhaps, he was alive to the modernist currents roiling the literature of his day, yet he turned his sensibility away from cities and the future and embraced nature, tradition, and the past.
Mathews was born in Pawhuska, the capital of the Osage Nation, in 1894. Oklahoma wasn’t a state yet. When Mathews was a toddler in 1897, a gargantuan reserve of oil was discovered beneath Osage land. Members of the tribe held what are called headrights, which entitled them to a share of the lease money oil companies paid to gain access to the land; this resulted in a massive influx of wealth into the territory. As if overnight, everyone got rich. (It’s this massive influx of wealth, and the horrific violence some white people unleashed in order to gain control of the headrights, that forms the central narrative of Killers of the Flower Moon.) As one of the most esteemed banking families in Pawhuska, the Mathewses benefitted directly from the boom, via headrights, and also indirectly via the surge in new business. They hired an Italian architect to build them a splendid house, complete with archways, European furniture, and a fountain. They held elegant parties. They took trips around the world.
The Mathewses lived between two worlds. They were proud of their Osage heritage, and in some ways were seen as leaders in the tribe. Mathews’s father served on the Tribal Council, as Mathews would later do himself. At the same time, many among the Osage didn’t see the Mathewses as Indians at all.
The Mathews family tree is simply an astounding document; you could build an academic course around it. Bloody and beautiful strands of American history run down the page. John Joseph’s great-grandfather, William Sherley Williams, was the child of Welsh immigrants who moved to North Carolina in the 18th century. He became a missionary, went west, and encountered the Osage tribe; this was in the early 1810s, just a few years after Lewis and Clark—before “the West” as we think of it was invented. Williams learned the Osage language and worked on an Osage Bible, but rather than converting the tribe to his religion, he seems to have been converted himself. He adopted their way of life, married an Osage woman called A-Ci’n-Ga, and had two half-Osage daughters, one of whom would become Mathews’s grandmother. A-Ci’n-Ga died sometime around 1820, and Williams drifted away from the tribe. In the 1830s and ’40s he became legendary as a mountain man. People told stories about “Old Bill Williams,” the drunken trapper and inveterate horse thief, a sort of vulgar ghost in the wilderness. He’d sometimes come down from the hills to guide an expedition, including some that killed dozens of Native Americans without provocation. The man who’d loved and lived among Indians now became known for abetting, perhaps even participating in, the murder of Indians. He was killed himself in 1849, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, by a Ute war party in Southern Colorado.
The two daughters of Old Bill and A-Ci’n-Ga, Mary Ann and Sarah, each married the same man, a Kansas businessman and trader named John A. Mathews. Sarah married him after Mary Ann died. John A. Mathews was admired by the Osage for dealing with them fairly, unlike most of the other white traders in their territory. He was also a slaveholder and passionate advocate of the pro-enslavement side during the Bleeding Kansas struggle in the 1850s. He led raids against abolitionists. He burned barns. Burned crops. Looted. Kidnapped. During the Civil War he tried to convince the Osage to join the Confederate side. His son, William—that’s our Mathews’s father, the future banker—once raced on horseback to warn a Jesuit mission that a guerrilla band led by his own father was coming to kill one of their priests. William was about 12 at the time. To reach that mission he had to ford a flooded river. The priest escaped.
John A. Mathews was tracked down by Union cavalry in 1861 and killed by a shotgun blast. The soldier who shot him was named Pleasant Smith. You think you’ve reached the upper limit of strangeness in American history; American history is just getting warmed up.
John Joseph Mathews’s mother came from a family of French Catholics. Mathews grew up, in his own telling, as a sort of “princeling,” spoiled and caressed. Everything came easily to him. In high school he was an athlete. His father loved going to his basketball games in the years before World War I. When I first encountered that detail in Michael Snyder’s invaluable biography of Mathews, John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer, I had to put the book down and walk around the room in a sort of momentary daze. Because there it is—there’s history. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of the pages turning. A missionary sets out into the wilderness in the Napoleonic era, and a handful of generations later, barely a blink of the cosmic eye, that same missionary’s grandson is sitting in a high school gym cheering at a basketball game.
Mathews studied at the University of Oklahoma. When the Great War broke out, he left college and enlisted as a pilot. He loved flying: the danger of it, the remoteness, the beauty of the world from the air. He wanted to fly in combat, but he was made an instructor instead. He taught night-bombing. After the war, he went back to college, where a writing mentor urged him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship. He didn’t apply for the scholarship—his grades weren’t good enough—instead, he decided to go to Oxford and pay for it himself. His father had died by this point, and the family business was now in decline, but Mathews had plenty of money from the Osage headrights. For a semester he put off leaving for England because he wanted to hunt bighorn sheep. He went to Wyoming, mixed with cowboys, drank in saloons, camped in the snow. Then he went to Oxford and transitioned to a life of punting on the Cherwell and debating philosophy over tea.
He traveled widely. Paris, Lausanne, Algiers. In Algeria, he hunted gazelles and leopards. With a guide named Ahmed, he traveled into the Sahara. One day, en route to view the Timgad Roman ruins, his party was surprised by a group of Kabyle tribesmen galloping toward them on horseback, firing Winchester rifles. The men weren’t hostile—they were goofing around, more or less. The vision of tribal warriors engaged in an ecstatic charge filled Mathews with a sudden longing to be back among the Osage. He recalled the joy he’d felt seeing Osage riders speeding across the prairie when he was a little boy. Decades later, in 1972, he described the moment for an interviewer: “What am I doing over here?” He remembered asking himself. “Why don’t I go back and take some interest in my people? Why not go back to the Osage. They’ve got a culture. So, I came back, then I started talking with the old men.”
He didn’t, though; at least not right away. In Switzerland he met a young socialite named Virginia Hopper, the granddaughter of a former president of the Singer sewing machine company. They got married and moved to California, where Mathews tried unsuccessfully to establish a real estate business. Mathews and Virginia had two children, but the marriage didn’t last. After five years, Mathews walked out. He went back to Oklahoma. With a startling callousness, he seems to have given his family very little thought from then on. He didn’t write to his children. He sent money infrequently, and never very much. His son became a child actor, which supported the family for a while. After that, Virginia had to pay the bills by having affairs with wealthy married men.
Spend enough time with Mathews and you’ll run into this strange coldness in him. He was popular, charismatic, easy to be around. But he was also self-sufficient. He liked to be alone. Why should he worry about other people? It’s another of his contradictions. Back in Osage country, he got elected to the Tribal Council and spent years working for the interests of the tribe. Consider that, along with his dedication to preserving the Osage oral tradition. What does that suggest? That he valued community, right? But look a little closer and you see a different Mathews.
“The Indian,” he wrote, “is a poet. He is very religious, and he appreciates beauty. Being so very close to nature, he is filled with the rhythm and harmony of nature, yet he is cruel, as nature is cruel.” Maybe he really believed he was writing about all Indians here—who knows. He was surely writing about himself.
He backed into writing. Didn’t know what else to do with himself. He’d left California, returned to Oklahoma, moved into a run-down cabin. What was he going to do there? He had a friend who was working on a biography of Sitting Bull. Why not try something similar? Around the same time, he’d been given a priceless gift: the journals of a Quaker Indian agent, Laban Miles, who’d lived among the Osage for 50 years and meticulously recorded their history. Many people had sought those journals, including the hugely popular novelist Edna Ferber, who’d written about the Osage in her blockbuster bestseller, Cimarron. Now Mathews had them. On July 4, 1931, he sat down and started typing. Everything had always come easily for him. A book poured out.
Mathews’s first book, a history of the Osage called Wah’Kon-tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road, took Miles’s diaries as the basis for a lyrical history of the tribe, a history less concerned with chronology and analysis than with impressionistic sweep. The book covered 1878 to 1931; Mathews immersed himself so deeply in the writing of it that he all but cut himself off from the outside world. The cabin didn’t have a telephone. The shower was a bucket. “I wrote that book just like a wood thrush would sing,” Mathews said. “He’s not conscious of it, he just sings. I didn’t have any idea that people would read it.”
People did. The book was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection in 1932, and this was a time when the Book of the Month Club had Oprah-level clout. Wah’Kon-tah, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, became an unlikely national bestseller. Mathews grudgingly traveled to New York City on a press tour. The cosmopolitan globetrotter was now so reluctant to leave his cabin that he forgot to bring the publicity posters his publisher had printed for him. In New York, publishers approached him about writing a novel. He agreed, with similar reluctance. The novel, written quickly and without much enthusiasm, appeared in 1934. It’s called Sundown. It’s the story of a mixed-race war veteran who comes home to Osage territory during the upheaval of the oil boom—that is, during the time of Killers of the Flower Moon. More than 80 years before David Grann brought the story to a national audience in 2017, Mathews had tried to do the same thing—or a version of it.
The differences between Killers of the Flower Moon and Sundown act as a concise index of the changes in American publishing between the 1930s and the 2010s. Killers of the Flower Moon is a taut, gripping nonfiction book, written in a mode that’s at least adjacent to true crime. Sundown is an evocative, challenging novel about a young man’s existential alienation. Mathews’s voice appears here and there in Grann’s novel—he’s quoted in the epigraph, and sporadically throughout the book—but Sundown is too weird and personal, too prone to spiraling around its repressed 1930s sexuality, too focused on the struggle of a single human soul to have been a major source for Grann’s work. Mathews himself didn’t like it. He didn’t look at it again for years after he finished it, and when he did finally pick it up, he was surprised to find it “not in the least bad.”
In later decades, however, it was Sundown that became Mathews’s most studied work. It established a template—Snyder describes it as “the homecoming of an alienated Native veteran who struggles with his identity”—that would be followed by numerous Native writers in the decades to come. It helped to bring about the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s. It influenced Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday. It may not quite be a great book, but it brought a new perspective into American fiction. It was a book about Indians that didn’t exoticize them or make them quaint for a white audience. It opened the door a crack and let a little more light in.
After Sundown, Mathews went more than a decade without publishing another book. Perhaps he still didn’t quite think of himself as an author. He was a hunter, a loner, and—way over on the other hand—a tribal advocate with a wide and varied network of friends all over the world. He got married again. Eventually he got back to writing books. Talking to the Moon, from 1945, describes the decade living in his cabin, amid the rhythm and harmony and cruelty of nature. In 1951 he published a biography, Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E.W. Marland, about the 1920s Oklahoma oil baron. Ten years after that, he published The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters, which represents the culmination of his work “talking to the old men” and writing down their old tales before they passed away.
I grew up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, not far from Mathews’s cabin, not far from where the events of Killers of the Flower Moon took place. Mathews wrote about my hometown. Knew it well. Was still alive, even, when I was born. And if you need a reason to check out his work, I’ll give you this: When I was growing up, I had no idea he’d existed. I had no idea about the murders, either. We weren’t taught about it. I’ll leave you to guess why. It wasn’t until years after I’d left Oklahoma that I discovered Mathews’s work, and that this history was made known to me. These things are so easily forgotten. Old people die, the page turns, the eye blinks, and then: oblivion. It’s the message Mathews spent his whole career trying to persuade his readers to see. Our stories—I mean humanity’s—are fragile. We should remember them while we can.
There was a time when futurists were predicting that the advent of 3D printing was going to change our lives.. that each of our houses would have a 3D printer to make whatever items we need. What virtually no one predicted, though, was that there might soon be 3D printers that could construct almost the entire house.
But that’s just what a 6-year-old Austin, Texas company called Icon is doing.. 3D printing buildings. And if you believe Icon’s mission-driven young founder, 3D printing could revolutionize how we build, help create affordable housing, even allow us, to.. wait for it.. colonize the moon. Sound out of this world? Take a look..
What you’re watching is the building.. actually, the printing, of a 4-bedroom home. On this construction site, there’s no hammering or sawing, just a nozzle squirting out concrete — kind of like an oversized soft serve ice cream dispenser — laying down the walls of a house one layer at a time. It’s the brainchild of a 41-year-old Texan who’s rarely without a cowboy hat, Jason Ballard.
A 3D printer squeezes out the concrete mixture for the houses.
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: 3D printing a house.
Jason Ballard: Yes, ma’am.
Lesley Stahl: People are gonna hear that and say, “No.”
Jason Ballard: We’re sitting inside one right now.
Lesley Stahl: This house was printed?
Jason Ballard: Yes, ma’am.
Lesley Stahl: Oh.
Jason Ballard: There you are.
Lesley Stahl: Look at this.
Jason Ballard: Welcome.
And so was this one. Does a concrete home printed by a robot have to look cold and industrial? Maybe not.
Lesley Stahl: I like the curved wall.
Ballard gave us a peek at the first completed model home in what will soon be the world’s first large community of 3D-printed houses – a hundred of them.. part of a huge new development north of Austin. They’ll start in the high $400 thousand range. How exactly does 3D printing a house work? Well, it starts with this one-and-a-half-ton sack of dry concrete powder, which gets mixed with water, sand, and additives, and is then pumped to the robotic printer.
Conner Jenkins: Now, you are looking at how we control the bead size.
Conner Jenkins, Icon’s manager of construction here, explained that the printer completes one layer called a “bead” every 30 minutes, by which time it’s hardened enough to be ready for the next bead. Steel is added every 10th layer for strength.
Lesley Stahl: The amount of change you’re making is–
Conner Jenkins: Tiny.
It takes about two weeks to print the full 160-bead house. Jenkins gave me the controls.. an iPad.
Houses are being built using 3D-printing technology in Texas.
60 Minutes
Conner Jenkins: So look, Lesley, that’s a little skinny. Will you press the plus 1% real quick?
Lesley Stahl: Aren’t you worried?
Conner Jenkins: Done. You just increased the bead size incrementally.
Lesley Stahl: I’d be worried if I were you.
But turns out the path is entirely pre-programmed. I couldn’t mess it up if i tried.
Lesley Stahl: Don’t tell the people–
Conner Jenkins: I think that’s the most gorgeous bead I’ve ever seen. I think this’ll be the highest selling house. (laughs)
For now, as Jason Ballard showed us, Icon is only 3D printing walls, with cutouts for plumbing and electricity. Roofs, windows and insulation are added the old-fashioned way, by construction workers. He calls it a paradigm shift in how we construct our housing.
Lesley Stahl: But why do we need a big shift like that?
Jason Ballard: ‘Cause right now, it is too expensive, it falls over in a hurricane, it burns up in a fire, it gets eaten by termites. The way you try to make it affordable is you trim quality on materials. You trim quality on labor. The result is these cookie cutter developments. And, like, this is not the wor– like, we are not succeeding at something we have to get right. And on top of that, it’s an ecological disaster. And I would certainly say, it is existentially urgent that we shelter ourselves without ruining the planet we have to live on.
Jason Ballard: Fire resistant, flood resistant..
Ballard showed us a sample of a 3D-printed wall beside a conventionally built one.
Lesley Stahl: You say it’s faster, more efficient.
Jason Ballard: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: Why do you say that?
Jason Ballard: What you’ve got, let’s count the materials. Siding, one. Moisture barrier, two. Sheathing, three. Stud, four. Drywall, five. And then float tape and texture, you can count that either as one or three, but you’ve got at least half a dozen novel steps that have to take place to deliver an American stick frame wall system. By comparison, we need a single material supply chain, delivered by a robot.
Jason Ballard demonstrated the difference between a conventionally built wall and a 3D-printed wall.
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: Let’s talk about waste.
Jason Ballard: Yes, ma’am.
Lesley Stahl: Over here.
Jason Ballard: At the end of constructing a home with these materials, there are truckloads, and truckloads of waste left over. These studs are gonna have off-cuts that go into a waste pile. Same with siding, same with drywall.
Whereas with 3D printing, he says, you only print what you need.
Jason Ballard: So in short, like if an alien came down to Planet Earth and saw these two ways of building and said, “From first principles, which is better?” The alien would go, “Stronger, faster, termite resistant, fire resistant, like by a mile this is the best way to build.
Though old-school construction workers may disagree. If Ballard sounds a little like a revved-up salesman, or a preacher, there’s a reason for that. He grew up in east Texas, a studious, outdoorsy, spiritual kid, first in his family to graduate from college.
Lesley Stahl: You were thinking about becoming an Episcopal priest.
Jason Ballard: Yeah, I was almost an Episcopal priest. But along the way, I started just, like, getting this, like, itch about housing not being right. So I studied conservation biology. I got involved in sustainable building, and I worked at the local homeless shelter. And so now I’m thinking about homelessness and I’m working in sustainable building. Along the way, my hometown gets destroyed by a hurricane. And I have to go help my family pull drywall outta their house. I– I feel like–
Lesley Stahl: Oh, wow.
Jason Ballard: –life is just putting housing in front of me, right as I’ve been, like, approved to go to seminary. And so I go to my bishop, the Bishop of Texas, Andy Doyle. He’s still the Bishop of Texas. And– I said, “What do I do?” (laughs) And at the end, he said, “Jason, I want you to pursue this housing thing like this is your priesthood. This is your vocation. And if it doesn’t work out, the church has been here for a long time. We’ll still be here.”
Lesley Stahl: But that must’ve turned the switch for you.
Jason Ballard: It did. It made it more than a hobby or a business, right, that it sorta became a mission.
He began pursuing that mission with Evan Loomis, a buddy from Texas A&M who had gone into finance.
Evan Loomis: As we looked at it, like, nobody had incorporated kinda the holy trinity of innovation to housing which was robotics, advanced materials, and software.
So in a borrowed warehouse on nights and weekends, and having read everything they could find about the mechanics of 3D printing, they tried to design a 3D printer that could make a building.
Lesley Stahl: How big was it?
Jason Ballard: It was ten feet, by 10 feet, by 10 feet. So it would’ve– it would’ve printed– if we had ever gotten it to work, which we did not– (laughs) it would have printed, like, a 100 square foot, like, demonstration building.
They didn’t get it to work, but enter Alex Le Roux, a recent Baylor engineering graduate, who was tinkering with a similar idea.
Lesley Stahl: Did you ever actually build anything?
Alex Le Roux: Yeah I did.
Lesley Stahl: What was it?
Alex Le Roux: A printed shed. A shed doesn’t sound too cool, but it was a big milestone.
Jason Ballard: It’s a real structure.
Alex Le Roux: Yeah.
Alex Le Roux, Jason Ballard and Evan Loomis founded Icon together.
60 Minutes
The three co-founded Icon in 2017, and soon got funding to print a small house to unveil at Austin’s SXSW festival the following spring. They built a new, larger printer, that worked.
Alex Le Roux: And we got really excited.
But the kinks hadn’t quite been worked out.
Alex Le Roux: So at one point, we ran the printer into the print.
Lesley Stahl: Explain that.
Jason Ballard: It was supposed to go up, and it went down, and then drove into the house (laughs) and, like, pushed a buncha–
Alex Le Roux: Exactly.
Jason Ballard: –layers off.
Funny now, but not so much at the time.
Jason Ballard: Some engineers folks who were, like, helping us, sat us down and said, “Guys, it’s been a great effort. But you’re not gonna get there. So, like, why don’t you guys get some rest?” And we were basically like, “Get out of here.” (laughter) We’re like–
Evan Loomis: It’s true.
Jason Ballard: –“A–anyone who wants to sh– to finish this home may stay; everyone else needs to leave.”
Lesley Stahl: And the three of you all agreed on that?
Alex Le Roux: Yeah.
Jason Ballard: We knew that we were on to something. And, like, we– this was, like, our shot. And we weren’t gonna miss it.
They worked round the clock, and made the festival deadline by just hours.
Evan Loomis: Hey Ballard, any words for the victory lap?
Jason Ballard: Never, never never never give up.
Jason Ballard: I stand by those words. Yeah, sure. (laughs) Never give up.
He showed us the 350-square-foot finished house.
Lesley Stahl: It’s a small little house, but it’s kind of elegant.
Jason Ballard: “Well, I’ll be. That’s not so bad.” I mean I think (laughs) that’s kinda how people felt about it–
Lesley Stahl: Yeah.
Jason Ballard: It was, like, better than they expected. And it was easy to believe, “Well, they’ll get better.”
That small little house won Icon a lot of attention.. an innovation award.. investors.. meetings with the military.. and with another Austin innovator — Alan Graham, who created a village called Community First! that provides small homes to several hundred of the formerly homeless.
Alan Graham: Our goal was really the most despised, outcast, lost and forgotten of our community.
Lesley Stahl: Oh, wow.
Alan Graham: Average time on the streets is nine years. Average age of death is 59.
Jason Ballard: It’s an absolute miracle out there. And so when we were ready to start building homes, one of the first organizations we reached out to was Alan Graham.
So Icon 3D printed a welcome center, and then six small houses for village residents. That’s how 73-year-old Tim Shea, who battled heroin addiction for decades, in 2020 became the first person in this country to live in a 3D-printed home.
Tim Shea and Lesley Stahl
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: Before I saw these houses in my mind, I thought it must be cold. You’re shaking ’cause you don’t think that.
Tim Shea: No. Just the opposite. You feel embraced– you know, enveloped.
Alan Graham: People that live, that are in the economic strata, the men and women that we serve are gonna be the last people on the planet that are gonna benefit out of new technology. And he wanted to make sure that they were the first.
Lesley Stahl: The first person in North America to live in a 3D-printed house was homeless.
Tim Shea: Yeah, I– isn’t that somethin’?
The years since have seen tremendous growth for Icon: a new factory to build more printers, and improve the quality of its concrete and a facility called ‘Printland’ to experiment with new designs. Icon has printed small homes in rural Mexico, vehicle hide structures for the Marine Corps, huge barracks for the Army and Air Force and a deluxe showcase home featuring wavy walls and curves that would be prohibitively expensive if built traditionally, but not when programmed into a 3D printer.
Lesley Stahl: So in your minds, is your customer a homeless person? Or is your customer me?
Jason Ballard: There’s a trick here because what our heart wants to do is to serve the very poor. And it’s often been, like, confusing for people to understand. It’s like, “I thought you guys were helping homelessness. Why are you building that fancy house?”
Lesley Stahl: Yeah.
Jason Ballard: I would resign if I was only allowed to build luxury homes. And we would go bankrupt right now if all we built was 3% margin homes for homeless people. But once this technology arrives in its full force– I think it fundamentally transforms the way we build.
It has been a staple of science fiction forever — humans living and working on the moon. But for NASA, that dream is almost within reach. Their new Artemis program plans to return American astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years — this time, not just to visit, but eventually to stay and even use the moon as a base for exploring Mars and beyond. But staying on the moon requires infrastructure — landing pads, roads, housing — and you can’t exactly bring two-by-fours and sheetrock on a spacecraft. That’s where 3D printing comes in. NASA is partnering with Jason Ballard’s company Icon to pioneer 3D printing on the moon.
Last fall, NASA launched the first in a series of Artemis missions. The next, with crew on board, is scheduled for next fall. And by the end of the decade, an Icon printer is supposed to fly to the moon to test print part of a landing pad. Jason Ballard, who once applied to be an astronaut but was rejected, can’t wait.
Jason Ballard: If the schedule holds, or even approximately holds, the first object ever built on another world will be built with Icon hardware.
Lesley Stahl: He wants Icon to be the first company to make something on another world.
Corky Clinton: So do we.
At Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, NASA scientists Jennifer Edmunson and Corky Clinton run a program called Impact.. spelled M-M-P-A-C-T.
NASA scientists Jennifer Edmunson and Corky Clinton
60 Minutes
Corky Clinton: Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technologies.
Lesley Stahl: Whoa. You people at NASA, you come up with these very, very (laughs) long names.
Corky Clinton: That’s why we call it MMPACT. (laughs)
The key word there is autonomous.
Corky Clinton: We want to be able to make structures that we need without having to be tended by astronauts.
Jennifer Edmunson: If you’re gonna have a truly sustainable presence on the lunar surface, you have to be as Earth-independent as possible.
NASA was interested in 3D printing, having looked at an early version almost 20 years ago. So when they heard about the progress Icon had made with their first houses in Austin, Corky Clinton traveled there to take a look.
Corky Clinton: Being an engineer, I spent a lot of my time going around and looking at the size of the beads and how they went around the corners, and I’ll tell ya, I was really impressed with what they had accomplished.
Impressed enough that NASA gave Icon development money in 2020, and then, last fall, a $57 million contract.
Jason Ballard: Welcome to Spacelab, Lesley. This is where we figure out how to build on other worlds.
Ballard and Evan Jensen, who leads the project, explained the fundamental challenge.
Jason Ballard: To bring an object roughly this size from Earth to the moon’s surface would be $1 million. And think of how many sort of brick-sized things we would need to do — launch pad, landing pads, roads, habitats, so we have to learn to live off the land.
Lesley Stahl: You have to learn to build it there and use the material–
Jason Ballard: Correct. Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: –from there.
Jason Ballard: That’s right.
But that’s no easy feat. It means using what’s called lunar regolith, which covers the moon’s surface, rather than concrete and water, as a building material.
Jennifer Edmunson: Regolith is made up of rock that has been pummeled over billions of years from asteroids, comets and things.
Lesley Stahl: Is it like sand?
Jennifer Edmunson: It’s actually finer than sand.
Icon has a big tub full of simulated moon regolith, and they have invented and built a robotic system to 3D print with it.
Lesley Stahl: You’re gonna build all those roads and buildings out of this?
Evan Jensen: That’s correct. The robots will.
Jason Ballard: This is actually the mission that we are scheduled to fly.
As he pointed out in this rendering…
Jason Ballard: Our robotic arm with our laser system..
They’ve created a whole new way to 3D print — with lasers. Instead of a nozzle squirting out soft concrete, a high-intensity laser beam will melt the powdery regolith, to transform it into a hard, strong, building material. they’re running experiments now, using the laser to create a small sample.
Jason Ballard: Once that red light is on, we’re hot.
Lesley Stahl: Oh.
Jason Ballard: Lots of power.
Martyn Staalsen: Here we go.
Jason Ballard: Here we go.
We watched on monitors as the arm got into position.
Martyn Staalsen: There’s the laser.
Lesley Stahl: Oh. That white thing is the laser.
Evan Jensen: So it’s melting right now– It’s going up to, say, 1,500 degrees Celsius.
Jason Ballard: It’s gonna complete its second pass. You can see it emerging there.See the dark object on the screen? That’s the object we just made with the laser.
They can add more regolith and laser again and again to build in layers to go as high as they want, which will be done remotely from earth. It takes hours to cool, so they showed me a sample they’d made days earlier.
Lesley Stahl: This is pretty darn hard.
Evan Jensen: That’s our landing pad. You’re holding it.
Lesley Stahl: I’m holding the landing pad?
Jason Ballard: That’s exactly right.
Lesley Stahl: It’s pretty cool. That’s a scientific term.
NASA uses a plasma torch to test the printed material provided by Icon.
Icon sends them to NASA, where they’re blasted with this special plasma torch..
Corky Clinton: The torch will be about 4,000 degrees
To see if they can take the heat a landing pad would have to withstand.
Corky Clinton: See there.
Lesley Stahl: Oh, there it is.
The torch is so bright, you have to watch on a monitor.
Corky Clinton: That was it.
A few minutes later, out it came.
Lesley Stahl: Oh. It’s just a little bit warm.
Corky Clinton: It looks good to me. I don’t see any loss of material. I don’t see any cratering.
Lesley Stahl: It survived the test?
Corky Clinton: Passed the test with flying colors.
The next test will be operating the entire robotic arm and laser..
Corky Clinton: We’ll put in a large-scale simulant bed.
Inside NASA’s giant thermal vacuum chamber, which mimics the moon’s extreme cold, heat, and vacuum conditions.
Jason Ballard: This is sort of like–
Ballard’s idea is to eventually send mobile 3D printers to the moon..
Jason Ballard: So this moves the printer around..
With a longer robotic arm sticking out of the top to print whatever is needed.
Jason Ballard: And then they would build the road and then they would build those habitats. Right?
This Icon rendering shows what 3D printing on the moon might look like.
Provided to 60 Minutes by Icon
And it wouldn’t stop there.
Jason Ballard: If we can do it on the moon, we can do it on Mars. The moon is actually harder.
Lesley Stahl: It’s harder?
Jason Ballard: Mars is almost in every way easier, except for it’s so far away.
Easier, they agree, because for one thing, Mars doesn’t have extreme temperature swings.
Lesley Stahl: Still, in my mind, it’s science fiction. But in your minds, it’s absolutely in the palm of your hand. It’s going to happen.
Jennifer Edmunson: We can see the steps and the technology to get us there.
Lesley Stahl: Now, that’s thrilling.
Corky Clinton: It’s exciting.
Jason Ballard: Quality can’t go backwards in Block 4.
Icon says trying to 3D print on the moon and Mars is helping with their work here on Earth. They are formulating new mixes to reduce the carbon footprint of their concrete.
Alex Le Roux: We think we will be there by end of year.
And they’re trying out more radical architecture..
Jason Ballard: Quite complex shapes and geometries. Almost looks like ripples on the surface of water.
Patterned walls..
Jason Ballard: It’s very subtle.
Lesley Stahl: Oh, look at this.
Jason Ballard: Yeah, it almost looks impossible.
And next year, as in these renderings, they’ll be printing round hotel rooms in Marfa, Texas.. and futuristic-looking designer homes.
Jason Ballard: You see a bedroom on that end with a shower and a bedroom here. And here’s some renderings of the interior.
Lesley Stahl: Wow.
Jason Ballard: Right? It gets you goin’, doesn’t it?
Lesley Stahl: We’re living at time, right now, where a lot of CEOs have been caught over-promising, hyping.
Jason Ballard: Mm-hm.
Lesley Stahl: I’m thinking of Theranos.
Jason Ballard: You’re absolutely right. And it– and it– it’s– it’s– it’s a tougher thing than you know. Because part of the job is to get your investors, get your team, and in our case the world– to believe the things you are saying. Except the things you are saying don’t exist yet.
Lesley Stahl: Yeah. Oh, boy–
Jason Ballard: You– you need to get them to believe..So it’s hard to know– like, even in this interview, I actually haven’t yet told you all the things I believe we’re going to do, ’cause I’m, like, measuring myself.
Lesley Stahl: Give us one example. (laughs) Something wild.
Jason Ballard: I mean, in the future, I think most buildings will be designed by AI, most projects will be run by software, and almost everything will be built by robots. And I don’t think that’s that far away.
Lesley Stahl: I at my age find that very depressing–
Jason Ballard: Haa–
Lesley Stahl: –but I’m sure young people don’t–
Jason Ballard: –well, lemme– yeah, no, no. That world, housing will be more abundant, more affordable, more beautiful. It will make this version of housing look depressing by example.
Lesley Stahl: You know that expression, “If it seems too good to be true, it is?”
Jason Ballard: Or– I do know that expression. But cars, and airplanes, and moon landings seemed too good to be true for a moment as well. And so, like maybe the only proof I can give you is, like, I’m betting my life on it. Like, I have this one precious life to live, and I’m using it to do this. And if I could think of a better way, I’d be doing that instead, or I’d go fishing. Like, this is so hard. (laughs)
A dazzling solar eclipse, also known as a “ring of fire,” is set to cross the Americas this month.
Millions of skywatchers will be able to catch the spectacular sight on Saturday, Oct. 14. This is the last annular solar eclipse that will be visible from the U.S. until June 21, 2039, according to NASA. Alaska is the only U.S. state in the path of the 2039 eclipse.
What is an annular solar eclipse?
Annular solar eclipses happen when the moon passes between the sun and Earth while the moon is at the farthest point from Earth, according to NASA. The moon will partially cover the sun as it passes, creating a “ring of fire” effect. The eclipse has several phases: partial eclipse, annularity, return to partial eclipse and fourth contact.
This composite image shows the moon as it moves in front of the sun in a rare “ring of fire” solar eclipse as seen from Tanjung Piai in Malaysia on Dec. 26, 2019.
SADIQ ASYRAF/AFP via Getty Images
During the initial partial eclipse, the moon begins to pass in front of the sun. It slowly blocks more light from the sun, making the sun appear smaller. The phase is also known as first contact.
The moon passes completely in front of the sun about an hour and 20 minutes after the partial eclipse phase begins, leaving a “ring” of the sun visible behind the moon. This phase is quick, lasting between 1 and 5 minutes in most places. The sky grows dimmer during this phase and some animals might act as if it’s dusk. The air may feel cooler.
The moon then returns to a partial eclipse as it continues passing the sun. This phase is also called third contact. Once the moon is no longer overlapping with the sun, the eclipse is over. This is known as fourth contact.
Where will the eclipse be visible? NASA shares maps
The eclipse will cross North, Central and South America, according to NASA maps. Most people in the Americas will be able to see at least a partial eclipse, but some people on a path from Oregon down to Texas will see the full eclipse as the moon passes in front of the sun.
A map showing where the moon’s shadow will cross the U.S. during the 2023 annular solar eclipse and 2024 total solar eclipse.
NASA/Scientific Visualization Studio/Michala Garrison; eclipse calculations by Ernie Wright, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
The annual solar eclipse in the U.S. will begin in Oregon at 9:13 p.m. It will end in Texas at 12:03 p.m. CDT. It will continue over Mexico and Central America, passing over Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. The eclipse also crosses over into South America in Columbia and northern Brazil before ending at sunset in the Atlantic Ocean.
When will the “ring of fire” eclipse be visible?
The eclipse will be most visible if there are clear skies. There will still be noticeable “eerie daytime darkness associated with eclipses” if it’s cloudy, NASA said.
NASA provided start and end times for several cities along the path of the eclipse.
Location
Partial Eclipse Begins
Annularity Begins
Maximum
Annularity Ends
Partial Eclipse Ends
Eugene, Oregon
8:06 a.m. PDT
9:16 a.m. PDT
9:18 a.m. PDT
9:20 a.m. PDT
10:39 a.m. PDT
Alturas, California
8:05 a.m. PDT
9:19 a.m. PDT
9:20 a.m. PDT
9:21 a.m. PDT
10:43 a.m. PDT
Battle Mountain, Nevada
8:06 a.m. PDT
9:21 a.m. PDT
9:23 a.m. PDT
9:25 a.m. PDT
10:48 a.m. PDT
Richfield, Utah
9:09 a.m. MDT
10:26 a.m. MDT
10:28 a.m. MDT
10:31 a.m. MDT
11:56 a.m. MDT
Albuquerque, New Mexico
9:13 a.m. MDT
10:34 a.m. MDT
10:35 a.m. MDT
10:39 a.m. MDT
12:09 p.m. MDT
San Antonio, Texas
10:23 a.m. CDT
11:52 a.m. CDT
11:54 a.m. CDT
11:56 a.m. CDT
1:33 p.m. CDT
Those interested in watching the eclipse virtually can also visit NASA’s YouTube page. The space agency will stream telescope views from around the country beginning at 10:30 a.m. CT on Oct. 14.
What to wear to protect your eyes during the eclipse
Even though the moon will be passing in front of the sun, it’s still not safe to look directly into the sun. Even a sliver of the sun peeking out from behind the moon is enough to potentially permanently scorch your retinas, according to ophthalmologists.
NASA advises wearing specialized eye protection. Looking at the sun through binoculars, a camera lens or a telescope without using a special-purpose solar filter can instantly cause severe eye injury. Eclipse glasses and sunglasses are not the same, NASA warned.
Look for glasses certified to meet the ISO 12312-2 international safety standard.
Safe solar viewers are thousands of times darker than sunglasses. NASA advises inspecting your eclipse glasses or handheld viewers before use to make sure they’re not torn, scratched or otherwise damaged.
People with eclipse glasses or handheld viewers should not use them in conjunction with cameras, binoculars, or telescopes; those devices require different types of solar filters.
People without eclipse glasses or a handheld solar viewer can use a pinhole projector.
Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion have a problem with wasting your time. CD Projekt Red’s open-world RPG has a feature where you have to wait an undetermined amount of time for certain quests to activate, and that persists into Phantom Liberty. Even now, after the epic 2.0 update revamped a bunch of the game, it’s still making players wait around doing nothing, praying for the next mission to pop.
Phantom Liberty Is Undoing One Key Thing That Cyberpunk Got Right
I suppose you could argue this is a creative choice meant to encourage you to spend time dipping into side missions instead of just barreling through the main quest. Cool, but then you have to wait large chunks of time before you can get back to the quests you actually want to play. The largely excellent new Phantom Liberty expansion has one of the most egregious examples of this yet, and it sounds like a lot of players are struggling with it.
The final mission in one of Phantom Liberty’s two routes is called “The Killing Moon.” Without getting into the specifics, some messy shit goes down and you have to wait for a phone call from Songbird, the skilled netrunner you meet at the beginning of the expansion. While I was playing Phantom Liberty for review, I noticed that this specific wait was probably the longest I’d experienced in my three years of playing Cyberpunk 2077.
I killed time by using the in-game wait feature, knocking off side-quests, and aimlessly sprinting around the map in hopes that she’d finally hit my line. Eventually, I got the quest to proc but it took days, maybe weeks of in-game time. I discussed this moment with other reviewers who experienced the same trouble, but we couldn’t pin down any real throughline as to what finally got Songbird to make the call. It seemed arbitrary.
Now, the expansion is out, and I was watching video producer and writer Sam Greer stream the expansion on her Twitch channel. It took her around 40 minutes to get the quest to activate. This prompted me and other viewers to try and find answers as to what the hold-up was, and it turns out that a lot of people are running into this issue. There are a handfulofReddit threads about “The Killing Moon” and the painful wait to get back into the action.
Some Redditors have suggested that you need to complete the quest “Run This Town,” which you get via a phone call from Mr. Hands, before events will progress, but Greer was able to finally continue “The Killing Moon” without completing that other quest.
Kotaku has reached out to CD Projekt Red about the issue and will update the story should we hear back. But if you’re running into this problem, know you’re not alone, and the quest is likely not bugged. There’s conflicting information on how to actually get it moving again, though.
The final supermoon of 2023 will shine in the sky as September comes to a close.
September’s full moon, also known as the harvest moon, will be the last of four consecutive supermoons.
What is a supermoon?
The supermoon phenomenon occurs when the moon’s orbit is closest to Earth at the same time as the moon is full, according to NASA. The upcoming supermoon will be about 224,854 miles from Earth; the moon’s distance from Earth varies between about 221,457 miles, and 252,712 miles.
Supermoons are usually about 16% brighter than an average moon. They also appear bigger than the average full moon. According to NASA, it’s similar to the size difference between a quarter and a nickel.
This month’s supermoon will appear about 5% bigger and 13% brighter than the average full moon of 2023. August’s super blue moon was the biggest of the year.
When to see the “Harvest” supermoon
The supermoon will rise between Thursday night and Friday morning. It will reach peak illumination at 5:58 a.m. EDT Friday, according to the Farmer’s Almanac.
The “Harvest” moon is the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox, according to NASA.
It got its name because September is a critical month for crop harvesting in the Northern Hemisphere, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. Sometimes the “Harvest” moon occurs in October.
August’s two full moons were dubbed the “Sturgeon Moon” and “Blue Moon.” October’s upcoming full moon will be called the “Hunter’s Moon.”
How to see and take pictures of the supermoon
All you need to do is go outside and look up, NASA says. A telescope or binoculars will magnify the moon and clarify details on its surface.
If you’re looking to snap some shots of the moon, NASA advises using something to stabilize your cellphone or camera. Turn the flash off and focus the camera on the moon rather than on the sky. Using a timer can help you avoid jostling the phone or camera as the picture is being taken. People with a telescope can also take pictures through its eyepiece.
Japan’s “Moon Sniper” mission blasted off Thursday as the country’s space program looks to bounce back from a string of recent mishaps, weeks after India’s historic lunar triumph.
Only the United States, Russia, China and as of last month India have successfully landed a probe on the Moon, with two failed Japanese missions — one public and one private.
Watched by 35,000 people online, the H-IIA rocket lifted off early Thursday from the southern island of Tanegashima carrying the lander, which is expected to touch down on the lunar surface in early 2024.
To cheers and applause at mission control, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, and the XRISM space research satellite developed with the US and European space agencies both separated soon afterwards.
An H2-A rocket carrying a small lunar surface probe and other objects lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Centre on Tanegashima island, Kagoshima prefecture, Japan, on Sept. 7, 2023. The rocket is carrying what Japan hopes will be its first successful Moon lander.
STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images
The launch had already been postponed three times because of bad weather.
The SLIM is nicknamed the “Moon Sniper” because it is designed to land within 100 meters of a specific target on the surface. That is much less than the usual range of several kilometers.
“By creating the SLIM lander, humans will make a qualitative shift towards being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land,” Japanese space agency JAXA said before the launch.
“By achieving this, it will become possible to land on planets even more resource-scarce than the Moon.”
Globally, “there are no previous instances of pinpoint landing on celestial bodies with significant gravity such as the Moon,” the agency added.
XRISM will perform “high-resolution X-ray spectroscopic observations of the hot gas plasma wind that blows through the galaxies in the universe”, according to JAXA.
These will help study “the flows of mass and energy, revealing the composition and evolution of celestial objects.”
The lander is equipped with spherical probe that was developed with a toy company.
Slightly bigger than a tennis ball, it can change its shape to move on the lunar surface.
India last month landed a craft near the Moon’s south pole, a historic triumph for its low-cost space program.
Its success came days after a Russian probe crashed in the same region, and four years after a previous Indian attempt failed at the last moment.
India on Saturday also launched a probe carrying scientific instruments to observe the Sun’s outermost layers in a four-month journey.
Japan’s past attempts have also gone wrong, including last year when it sent a lunar probe named Omotenashi as part of the United States’ Artemis 1 mission.
The size of a backpack, Omotenashi would have been the world’s smallest Moon lander, but it was lost.
And in April, Japanese startup ispace failed in an ambitious attempt to become the first private company to land on the Moon, losing communication with its craft after what it described as a “hard landing”.
Japan has also had problems with its launch rockets, with failures after liftoff of the next-generation H3 in March and the normally reliable solid-fuel Epsilon last October.
In July, the test of an Epsilon S rocket, an improved version of the Epsilon, ended in an explosion 50 seconds after ignition.
As millions of stargazers around the world looked at the sky Wednesday night, they saw a full moon appearing larger than average. It was another “supermoon” — the second one in August 2023, making it a “blue moon.”
What is a blue moon?
Unlike what the name suggests, a blue moon is not actually blue in color. Rather, it signifies the second full moon within a single month — hence the phrase, “once in a blue moon.”
What is a supermoon?
The “supermoon” phenomenon occurs when the moon’s orbit is closest to Earth at the same time the moon is full. While around 25% of full moons are supermoons, just 3% of full moons are blue moons, according to NASA.
On average, supermoons are about 16% brighter than an average moon. They also appear bigger than the average full moon — with NASA comparing the size difference to that between a quarter and a nickel.
Saturn could also be seen appearing alongside the moon wherever skies were clear — adding to the celestial celebration.
Here are some photos of the super blue moon from around the world.
New York, New York
The blue moon is seen rising over the Statue of Liberty in New York on Aug. 30, 2023.
Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
San Francisco, California
A supermoon rises over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on Aug. 30, 2023.
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Edinburgh, Scotland
The super blue moon sets behind the Balmoral Clock in Edinburgh on Aug. 31, 2023.
Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images
Kashmir, India
A bed of flowers beneath the radiant blue supermoon on Aug. 30, 2023 in Srinagar in Kashmir, India.
Kabli Yawar Nazir / Getty Images
Darwin, Australia
The super blue moon rises behind a Ferris wheel located at Stokes Hill Wharf in Darwin, Australia, on Aug. 31, 2023.
DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images
Istanbul, Turkey
Tourists visit Istanbul’s famous Galata Tower as a rare super blue moon rises behind on Aug. 30, 2023 in Istanbul, Turkey.
Chris McGrath / Getty Images
When will the next super blue moon be?
Those who missed seeing a blue moon will have to wait quite a while before the next one in May 2026. And if you’re waiting for the next super blue moon, it’ll be even longer — until 2037, when astronomy fans will get to see super blue moons in January and March.
Michael Roppolo is a CBS News reporter. He covers a wide variety of topics, including science and technology, crime and justice, and disability rights.
Thanks for reading CBS NEWS.
Create your free account or log in for more features.
India’s moon rover confirmed the presence of sulfur and detected several other elements near the lunar south pole as it searches for signs of frozen water nearly a week after its historic moon landing, the country’s space agency said Tuesday. The rover’s laser-induced spectroscope instrument also detected aluminum, iron, calcium, chromium, titanium, manganese, oxygen and silicon on the lunar surface, the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, said in a post on its website.
The lunar rover had come down a ramp from the lander of India’s spacecraft after last Wednesday’s touchdown near the moon’s south pole. The Chandrayan-3 Rover is expected to conduct experiments over 14 days, the ISRO has said.
This image from video provided by the Indian Space Research Organisation shows the surface of the moon as the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft prepares for landing on Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023.
AP
The rover “unambiguously confirms the presence of sulfur,” ISRO said. It also is searching for signs of frozen water that could help future astronaut missions, as a potential source of drinking water or to make rocket fuel.
The rover also will study the moon’s atmosphere and seismic activity, ISRO Chairman S. Somnath said.
On Monday, the rover’s route was reprogrammed when it came close to a 13-foot-wide crater. “It’s now safely heading on a new path,” the ISRO said.
The craft moves at a slow speed of around one centimeter (half inch) per second to minimize shock and damage to the vehicle from the moon’s rough terrain.
After a failed attempt to land on the moon in 2019, India last week joined the United States, the Soviet Union and China as only the fourth country to achieve the milestone.
The successful mission showcases India’s rising standing as a technology and space powerhouse and dovetails with the image that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to project: an ascendant country asserting its place among the global elite.
The mission began more than a month ago at an estimated cost of $75 million.
India’s success came just days after Russia’s Luna-25, which was aiming for the same lunar region, spun into an uncontrolled orbit and crashed. It would have been the first successful Russian lunar landing after a gap of 47 years.
The head of Russia’s state-controlled space corporation Roscosmos attributed the failure to the lack of expertise due to the long break in lunar research that followed the last Soviet mission to the moon in 1976.
Active since the 1960s, India has launched satellites for itself and other countries, and successfully put one in orbit around Mars in 2014. India is planning its first mission to the International Space Station next year, in collaboration with the United States.
New Delhi — Scientists with India’s space program erupted with joy on Friday as a massive rocket lifted off with a bang and tore through the clouds, carrying an unmanned spacecraft on a mission to land on the dark side of the moon. A LVM3-M4 heavy-lift rocket carried the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, with its lunar lander and small rover, away from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, southern India, at 2:35 p.m. local time on Friday without a hitch.
It was a “text-book launch” as the rocket successfully delivered Chandrayaan-3 into orbit, scientists from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said.
Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-3, the word for “moon craft” in Sanskrit, is launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, July 14, 2023 aboard a LVM3-M4 heavyweight rocket.
Aijaz Rahi/AP
Chandrayaan-3 is the country’s third lunar exploration mission and scientists are hoping for a soft landing near the moon’s little-explored south pole in the months ahead.
It is India’s second attempt to land on the moon’s surface. In 2019, India’s second lunar probe, Chandryaan-2, failed, with a heart-breaking crash of its lander on the moon’s surface. The orbiter from the Chandrayaan-2 mission is still in lunar orbit and continues to send back data on the moon’s atmosphere today. That information will be used by Chandrayaan-3 in the current mission.
The spacecraft’s journey to the moon should take about 40 days, with the landing attempt expected on August 23. If the landing is successful, India will join an elite club currently made up of just three countries — the United States, Russia and China — that have pulled off successful moon landings.
If the lander touches down safely, the rover will explore the moon’s surface for one lunar day, or approximately 14 Earth days, to collect scientific data on our nearest celestial body’s composition.
“Chandrayaan-3 scripts a new chapter in India’s space odyssey. It soars high, elevating the dreams and ambitions of every Indian,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on Twitter after the launch. “This momentous achievement is a testament to our scientists’ relentless dedication. I salute their spirit and ingenuity!”
Chandrayaan-3 scripts a new chapter in India’s space odyssey. It soars high, elevating the dreams and ambitions of every Indian. This momentous achievement is a testament to our scientists’ relentless dedication. I salute their spirit and ingenuity! https://t.co/gko6fnOUaK
India’s first mission, 13 years ago, was a huge success as scientists said their lunar orbiter had detected water molecules around the moon’s south pole. It was the first evidence of water there – a discovery that startled scientists globally and raised hopes of the possibility of sustaining human life on moon in future.
India’s moon missions are seen as a demonstration of the country’s growing space prowess.
ISRO chief Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said the space agency had studied data from the last crash and used it to improve their lander.
Chandrayaan-3 weighs about 4.3 tons in total. The lander, called Vikram, weighs about 3,300 pounds and carries the rover, named Pragyaan, which weighs less than 60 pounds.
Models and images of India’s lunar lander are seen on July 7, 2023 in Bengaluru, India. India launched its third lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, on July 14, 2023, carrying the actual lunar lander, named Vikram, into orbit.
Pallava Bagla/Getty
“The rover is carrying five instruments which will focus on finding out about the physical characteristics of the surface of the moon, the atmosphere close to the surface and the tectonic activity to study what goes on below the surface,” Somanath told an Indian news outlet. “I’m hoping we’ll find something new.”
ISRO said the lander and rover were fitted with sensors and other high-tech instruments designed to carry out experiments and collect data on the chemical composition of lunar soil, measure any seismic activity, and measure the thermal properties of the lunar surface near its south pole.
Millions of Indians watched the spectacular launch of the rocket live on TV and social media platforms. Many described it as “a moment of pride, glory and joy,” while some said they got “goosebumps” watching the rocket lift off.
Three men and one woman have been selected for NASA’s next planned flight to the moon. For the first time ever, the crew of astronauts headed for the moon include a woman and a Black man. Mark Strassmann reports.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Nokia’s years-long partnership with NASA is finally taking the mobile giant where no cell phone provider has gone before — the moon.
There, the Finnish telecommunications company plans to establish the first lunar 4G network, enabling researchers to make new discoveries that could help support the establishment of a human colony on the moon, CNBC reported.
“Future missions that require HD video, robotics, sensing applications, telemetry or biometrics will need the advanced capabilities that cellular networks enable,” Nokia said on its web page about the NASA partnership.
Those technologies will help researchers locate lunar ice, which could help sustain human life on the planet by serving as a source of fuel, water and oxygen for future colonies, according to NASA.
Nokia plans to launch the network on a SpaceX rocket later this year, according to CNBC.
The company’s network setup features an antenna-equipped base station and a solar-powered rover that will communicate with one another through an LTE connection, CNBC reported.
This isn’t the first time NASA has partnered with a telecommunications company to support its out-of-this-world objectives. In 2015, the agency partnered with Verizon to create technologies that would “direct and monitor” civilian and commercial drones across the U.S. from Verizon’s expansive phone tower network, the Guardian reported.
Thanks for reading CBS NEWS.
Create your free account or log in for more features.
NASA and Axiom Space are unveiling the design of the new spacesuit that will be worn by the next man and first woman to land on the moon as part of the Artemis III mission. Mark Strassmann traveled to Houston to get a sneak peek of the new suit.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Telescopes in Hawaii and Chile have discovered a dozen new moons around Jupiter, bringing the total to 92 moons — more than any planet in our solar system.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25123658/Maestro.jpeg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25176334/Opnap_Flugvel.png)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24962276/tlov_trl_F_int_ov_v19_txt_scp_709_e02_cc01_20230630_00000_copy_21.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25106596/saltburn_First_Look___SLTB_2023_FG_01050023_Still941_R_rgb.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25176341/BIA_Thumbnail_Unconstrained.png)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25176345/AP23235667442739.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25069093/boss_unit_220920_01273_r.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25176357/trolls_band1_kpbc_superJumbo.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25089763/DF_23444_rv2_2000x1331_thumbnail.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25105401/silent_night_SILENTNIGHT_Unit_220415_00035RC_rgb.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25131881/64a70f1da7f079f477ba2af4_Anatomy_Of_A_Fall___Still_2.jpeg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24868173/Dream_Scenario_First_Look.jpg)
