Texas Republicans scored a little-known win in Trump's "big beautiful bill": the transfer of the iconic Space Shuttle Discovery housed in the Washington D.C. suburbs to a National Aeronautics and Space Administrationfacility in Houston.
The big picture: Forcing the relocation of the Discovery with questionable legal authority reflects the political and cultural pressure America's museums have been under regarding how to display, tell, and manage the country's history.
The Trump administration is flipping language about inclusion and diversity on its head to the advantage of white Americans as a requirement to receive federal grants.
Why it matters: The move follows the administration'sdramatic change to the government's interpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on "anti-white racism" rather than discrimination against people of color.
Leading tech and health companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, and OpenAI committed on Wednesday to working with the Trump administration to make electronic patient records more accessible across the health care system.
Why it matters: Patient health information is now scattered across multiple disconnected systems, leading to inefficiencies, medical errors and wasted time and money.
An estimated 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia's far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula Wednesday, triggering widespread tsunami warnings and evacuation orders along coastal areas in Japan and Hawai'i.
The big picture: Following one of the biggest quakes ever recorded, tsunami waves topping 5 feet were detected at Kaua'i Island, Hawai'i, and waves exceeding well over a foot were reported in several parts of California, where a tsunami warning remained in effect for the northern coast on Wednesday morning.
The current military model for trying and buying weapons and technology is the "biggest risk" to the U.S. and its friends abroad, according to Portal Space Systems CEO Jeff Thornburg.
"The allied nations, Five Eyes, AUKUS, NATO, take your pick — the acquisition process is too slow and broken. Requirements development process? Broken," he told Axios in an interview.
"It's taking too long to field systems the warfighters need right now, or they needed years ago."
Why he matters: Thornburg is an industry veteran. He led development of SpaceX's Raptor engine and has ties to Stratolaunch, Ursa Major and Amazon's Kuiper.
The U.S. Space Force will experiment withlaser communications and quantum sensing aboard a secretive Boeing-made spaceplane slated for launch this summer.
Why it matters: Much of the work executed by the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is classified.
A single photo of the Earth from space taken by an onboard camera caused a defense-media frenzy in February.
