America's love affair with supersize trucks and SUVs has a downside: The giant vehicles can be a menace to pedestrians, who have died in ever-greater numbers in recent years. Now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is proposing new rules, said NPR, designed to "reduce the number of pedestrians killed and seriously injured" on American roadways. 

The number of pedestrians killed in vehicle accidents has risen by 75% since 2009. The reasons for that rise surely include the "growing size and weight of vehicles," said NPR Big vehicles with "higher front ends and blunt profiles" are 45% more likely to cause fatalities than smaller cars.

The proposed rules will require auto companies to test their vehicles on crash test dummies that "simulate children and adults," said The Associated Press. The aim is to save lives. 

What did the commentators say?
Cars are safer than ever for the "people inside of them," Collin Woodard said at Jalopnik. But federal regulators have known for "over a decade" that action was needed to protect pedestrians. 

The proposed rules would apply to all American-made vehicles under 10,000 pounds, and "it's no secret that the Escalades and F-150s of the world are the primary targets," said Woodard. The rising number of pedestrian deaths makes the U.S. an "outlier" — in other developed countries, road deaths "have been dropping." 

Giant passenger vehicles in America are "too much of a good thing," said The Economist. Carmakers say they are giving buyers "what they want," but the rising death rate is too high a price to pay for "roomier interiors and more powerful engines." Analyses show a vehicle's weight is a "critical factor" in the survivability of vehicle crashes. Bottom line: "Reining in the heaviest vehicles would save lives."

What next?
Big trucks and SUVs could "look very different in the near future," said The Street. Automakers are also pushing to transition from gas-guzzling engines to electric vehicles, and the size of many popular vehicles is an obstacle to that shift. "We have to start to get back in love with smaller vehicles," Ford CEO Jim Farley said.

Since the 2010s, the private sector has been going to space, from SpaceX's venture to Mars to Blue Origin's space tourism services. And with that, an ever-expanding "space economy" has skyrocketed.

What is the space economy?
We are in a golden age of space exploration, which has ushered in the potential to create a whole new economy. "Space technologies are delivering greater value to a more diverse set of stakeholders than ever before," said Sebastian Buckup, a member of the executive committee of the World Economic Forum. "As costs reduce and accessibility rises, these technologies could reshape whole industries and have as much impact on business and society as smartphones or cloud computing." 

Areas including mineral mining, satellite creation and even space colonization are seeing a surge of interest from businesses, as more industries put their eyes on the skies. A report by McKinsey & Company and the World Economic Forum estimates that the global space economy will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035, compared to $630 billion in 2023. 

"What's really interesting about what's happening in space is the fundamental transformation of how it's being organized," Matthew Weinzierl, an associate dean at the Harvard Business School, said in an interview. "For a long time, when most people thought about what we do in space as humans, they thought of it as primarily a government-led activity." Now, businesses outside the government sphere are putting just as much research into space endeavors.

What can we expect?
Not everyone is excited. A growing number of "thinkers and activists are concerned that this new wave of space activity is motivated by our worst impulses on the Earth's surface and could reproduce some of our biggest mistakes," said Politico. "Anti-war activists have protested the perceived militarization of space," while "academics worry that its limitless expanse could worsen the excesses of billionaire capitalism." Others "warn that we are in danger of ignoring decades of evidence about what we have already done to our own planet."