Europa Clipper.

Polaris Dawn.

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Editor’s Note: We’ll have a “debate wrap-up” edition of Political News Items later today, which may be distributed to News Items subscribers as well. Joe Klein and I are recording a podcast about the debate at noon today and hope to have it up by tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, here is the transcript of the debate. What jumps off the page? There was not a single mention of artificial intelligence, arguably the most important public policy issue of the 21st Century.

I asked a cross-section of friends and subscribers to email me their reactions after the debate. (I had long since gone to sleep). Amongst Trump supporters: Harris too scripted and annoying, Trump not as good as hoped. Amongst Democrats and Trump-haters: Harris got the job done, Trump gets smaller every day. Amongst old pros: Harris on points — maybe she’ll get a bit of a bump in the polls. Maybe.

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1. Household incomes rose last year, marking the first increase since Covid-19 struck, as pandemic disruptions and surging inflation eased. New data from the U.S. Census Bureau signal a welcome improvement, fueled in part by a strong job market that has only more recently started to cool. The rate of inflation declined last year after spiking to a 40-year high in 2022.  Inflation-adjusted median household income was $80,610 in 2023, up 4% from the 2022 estimate of $77,540, the bureau said Tuesday in its annual report card on households’ financial well-being.  The income gains mark the first since 2019 and happened after the U.S. economy emerged from the depths of a global pandemic that scrambled supply chains and prompted major spending. (Source: wsj.com)

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2. A commercial space crew has flown higher above Earth than anyone who has traveled since the last Apollo astronauts went to the moon. The four members of the Polaris Dawn mission, riding aboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft "Resilience," climbed into an elliptical orbit with a high point, or apogee, of 870 miles (1,400.7 kilometers) on Tuesday (Sep. 10). They reached the record distance about 15 hours after lifting off at 5:23 a.m. EDT (0923 GMT) from Florida earlier in the day and circling the planet about eight times in an initial orbit of 190 by 1,200 miles (306 by 1,930 km). The crew's top altitude more than doubled the maximum height that NASA's space shuttle reached when it deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 and surpassed the previous record for a crewed spacecraft remaining in Earth orbit of 853 miles (1,373 km), achieved by NASA's Gemini 11 mission in 1966. (Source: space.com, collectspace.com, ) This ten-minute video of the first day of the Polaris Dawn mission is astonishing. (Source: youtube.com)

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