What happened
The Supreme Court yesterday blocked President Donald Trump’s plan to use the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting in November’s midterm elections. In a brief, unsigned decision, the court’s majority said the Trump administration was “unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge” to a district court’s injunction blocking the new requirements, and the “equitable factors” weighed against lifting the injunction. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. 

Who said what
The decision was a “stark defeat for Trump,” The Associated Press said, but it “allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years.” Nearly a third of the U.S. electorate votes by mail, and state election officials had warned that the administration was “inviting chaos by trying to deploy a new ballot-matching system” as states had already started mailing out ballots, Politico said. 

What next?
“Further litigation is expected” over the USPS’s ability to use Trump’s rules in future elections, The Wall Street Journal said, but yesterday’s decision “effectively guarantees that they will remain on ice during the midterms.” Trump’s “battle to assert control over the election process is far from finished,” The New York Times said. The “stymied” USPS order “was just one piece of a broader effort involving the full power of the federal government to take more control of state-run elections.” 

What happened
Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson’s “lavish” three-day wedding celebration in the Bahamas was “heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin,” ProPublica reported yesterday. Kremlev spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to rent out one of the “pair of ultra-exclusive private islands” that hosted the May wedding, plan the reception and put on a fireworks show, among other expenses. 

Bettina Trump confirmed the “extraordinarily generous wedding gift” on social media. “Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding,” she said, but he did not attend the “intimate” ceremony.

Who said what
Accepting Kremlev’s money was an “extraordinary flouting of ethical norms for an American president’s family,” which is “generally expected to steer clear of these sorts of personal and pricey gifts,” The New York Times said, “particularly from someone in a country like Russia.” About 50 guests attended the after-party, including Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, and some were “puzzled” by the presence of Kremlev and his Russian friends, ProPublica said. “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is,” a spokesperson told the publication. President Donald Trump said in a statement he also had “no idea who Umar is,” but “it was an ‘after-party’ given in their honor. Not a big deal!”

What next?
“This should be unthinkable for the son of the president,” retired FBI counterintelligence agent Frank Montoya Jr. told ProPublica “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something.”

Space travel is taking off, but landing on the moon will be no easy feat. As NASA prepares to place the first-ever spaceport in the moon’s orbit in the next 20 years, space exploration interests need to plan for the complicated logistics of several celestial vehicles taxiing and docking at the port and, eventually, at a permanent moon settlement.

NASA’s small Gateway space station is designed to be a “multipurpose outpost supporting lunar surface missions, science in lunar orbit and human exploration further into the cosmos,” the U.S. space agency said. With increased cosmic traffic, systems need to be in place to manage the flow, according to a study published in the journal Acta Astronautica. 

Unlike parking at an earthly airport, space vehicles require “continuous effort to counteract the forces of orbital physics” for “days or weeks” because each spacecraft is moving constantly, said Universe magazine. To tackle what could be a logistical nightmare, scientists ran thousands of computer simulations to test “strategies for keeping vehicles carefully spaced around Gateway while accounting for realistic navigation errors, thruster imperfections and even small disturbances expected during future Artemis missions,” Texas A&M University said in a news release. 

The proposal is to “get everything moving together, rather than each spacecraft focusing exclusively on its own path around the moon,” said the science publication Nautilus. “By sharing data and continually calculating the position of the Gateway, spacecraft can follow a ‘string of pearls’ formation that keeps everybody at a safe distance.”