Engineers Sprint Ahead, but Don’t Underestimate the Poets (5 minute read)
The advantages of choosing a STEM major fades after the first job, and by age 40, the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up. This may be because older workers in STEM areas have to learn on the job, whereas their younger counterparts learn skills in school, making them more competitive when entering the job market. Those who major in other fields usually develop stronger soft skills, which have long-run value in a wide variety of careers. With technology changing all the time, those who learned skills that were in demand would receive a short-run salary premium, but when the technology changes, these workers will have to compete with people who graduated while learning the new technology. People who took non-STEM majors were more likely to develop skills that eventually put them into high-paying management positions.
SpaceX Has Starry-Eyed Ambitions for Its Starship (6 minute read)
Elon Musk unveiled SpaceX's prototype spaceship, Starship, a vessel that is roomy enough to fit 100 passengers that will be powered by a massive, reusable rocket. Starship will be involved in multiple missions to carry people to different cities on Earth as well as to the moon and Mars. The unveiling event marks 11 years since SpaceX reached orbit for the first time with the earliest version of its Falcon rockets. Last month, a Starship prototype levitated about 500 feet into the sky and then glided down. Musk aims to have the prototype fly to 65,000 feet within one to two months, and in orbit within six months. While SpaceX has demonstrated that it can reliably deploy satellites and cargo to space, it has never launched people. NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing are each building their own transportation systems to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, but the projects are behind schedule.