A high-profile cosmetics company is providing a new look for NASA by using the International Space Station to market its products.

Estée Lauder is paying NASA to launch bottles of its nighttime skincare serum so they can be photographed aboard the International Space Station. The company is using the flight of its Advanced Night Repair Synchronized Multi-Recovery Complex to create content for its social media channels, as well as deliver back a unique flown-in-space artifact that Estée Lauder intends to auction for charity.

The bottles are launching on board Northrop Grumman’s NG-14 Cygnus cargo spacecraft, the S.S. Kalpana Chawla, which is scheduled to lift off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Sept. 29...

In addition to obtaining thousands of pages of internal staff complaints, assessments and whistleblower accounts, congressional staff conducted on-site inspections at 20 facilities in Arizona, California, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. 

The report cites, for instance, falsification of records involving Jean Carlos Jimenez-Joseph, a 27-year-old Panamanian migrant who committed suicide in May 2017 at ICE’s Stewart Detention Center in Georgia after reporting hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. 

Jimenez-Joseph was a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that allows undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children the ability to live and work in the United States...

SpaceX just popped another Starship test tank.

The Starship SN7.1 tank was destroyed on purpose Tuesday night (Sept. 22) at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, during a pressure test designed to take the stainless-steel hardware to its bursting point. 

SpaceX has performed several other such tests, including one this past June that blew the top off the SN7 tank. Such trials inform future iterations of Starship, the 100-passenger spacecraft Elon Musk’s company is developing to get people to Mars, the moon and other cosmic destinations. 

Related: SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy rocket in pictures

SN7.1’s death clears the way for testing of the SN8 prototype, which could begin as soon as this weekend...

Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida have each committed to bringing back earmarks if chosen to succeed retiring Chairwoman Nita M. Lowey after the November elections. A third candidate, Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, didn’t embrace that stance but didn’t rule it out, saying it was “premature” to discuss restoring earmarks at this stage.

Under the Modernization panel’s proposal, the grant program framework would only be possible if larger deficiencies in the budget and appropriations process are solved along the way, because grant projects wouldn’t be allowed in continuing resolutions.

The select committee isn’t the first to set out with the agenda to fix the dysfunctional budget and spending process in Congress, but it has made it further than its prede...

In October, if all goes to plan, the International Space Station (ISS) will celebrate 20 years of continuous human presence. That’s two decades, 63 expeditions, and dozens of astronauts and cosmonauts who lived and worked on board the orbiting lab nonstop. 

Former NASA astronaut Wendy Lawrence was supposed to fly in the predecessor program to ISS, called the Shuttle-Mir program. A handful of astronauts from NASA’s space shuttle program spent a few months each on the Russian (formerly Soviet) Mir space station in the 1990s. This allowed them to train regularly for the first time with cosmonauts, or Russian spaceflyers, since the joint NASA-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975.

But Lawrence will soon deliver a virtual talk that, in part, addresses a time when she was pulled from her planned...

In this inaugural episode of CQ Roll Call’s Equal Time, Mary C. Curtis reflects on this moment in time, examining the complexity and history of issues dividing the country in 2020. Today’s episode features Fatima Goss Graves, CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, discussing Breonna Taylor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and what is at stake for the courts, our country and women — especially those of color.

Show Notes:

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