Worth of goods and this round will apply to hundreds of consumer products but as N.P.R.'s Alina sell you a report a few categories of products have been removed from the new tariff list since it was 1st announced the summer unlike the 1st round of tariffs that mainly targeted industrial imports the new list of products has a lot of familiar items toiletries accessories housewares food and other major category is electronics but now the trumpet ministration says it will spare some electronic products specifically smart watches and Bluetooth devices this is a big win for Apple which had warned that the new tariffs would have hit a wide range of its products including Apple Watch and the air Pods bluetooth headphones other products that will be spared from the new tariffs are child safety items like bike helmets and car seats Alina so you can n.p.r. News Washington Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are demanding the f.b.i. Investigate allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Pret Kavanagh but the Department of Justice said in a statement tonight that the allegations don't involve any potential federal crime for them to investigate Meanwhile committee chair Chuck Grassley says they will hold a public hearing Monday with both Supreme Court nominee Cavanagh and Christine Ford who accuses him of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers he denies the allegations a committee had vote had been scheduled for later this week lawyers for former national security adviser Michael Flynn in the special counsel team are asking a judge to set a date for sentencing N.P.R.'s Carrie Johnson reports the move singles Flynn's cooperation with authorities is reaching an end in a new filing the government and the defense are requesting a judge sentence Michael Flynn at the end of November that will push any punishment for the president's one time national security adviser until after the midterm elections fill in pleaded guilty last year to lying to the f.b.i. About his contacts with foreign officials at the time he said the deal was in the best interest of his family he. Been cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election for about 9 months Flynn's been itching to move on to the next phase of his life last week and he collected an award from a conservative group in St Louis Carrie Johnson n.p.r. News Washington more than 30 deaths are now being attributed to Florence as waters continue to rise in North Carolina officials are warning the rising Cape Fear River and Fayetteville could overtop its banks by a mile on both sides Meanwhile the remnants of Florence have moved into Virginia spawning apparent tornadoes that killed one person and damaged several buildings lower by the closing bell the Dow down 92 points the Nasdaq down $114.00 points that's down 1.4 percent the s. And p. $500.00 down 16 points you're listening to n.p.r. News president Tropez declassified scores of documents and texts related to the F.B.I.'s Russia investigation including parts of a secret surveillance warrant and former f.b.i. Director Jamie James Cole nice text messages he says he did it at the behest of Republican lawmakers who think the investigation is tainted by antitrust bias in the f.b.i. Among the documents released without redaction those related to the surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter page and interviews with senior Department of Justice lawyer Bruce or. The new Government Accountability Office report finds that the federal government's estimated cost of the 2020 census isn't reliable N.P.R.'s Hansi Lo Wang reports the upcoming national headcount is expected to be the most expensive census in u.s. History the Commerce Department which oversees the Census Bureau says the 2020 census from start to finish is expected to cost more than $15000000000.00 preparations for the 1st u.s. Headcount we conducted online are driving up i.t. Costs plus the Census Bureau says it may have to hire more workers to go door to door to collect information because it's now expecting fewer households respond online and a lot of responding to the Government Accountability Office is findings the Commerce Department says it's estimated cost for the $20.00 twentieth's and says is reliable but it needs to better document how it calculates that estimate on fuel long n.p.r. News New York Asian markets are trading in mixed territory at this hour the Nikkei the main market in Japan up nearly 9 tenths of a percent but the Hang Seng in Hong Kong is down just over one percent I'm Janine Herbst n.p.r. News in Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from the Charles Stuart maad foundation supporting efforts to promote a just equitable and sustainable society in its hometown of Flint Michigan and communities around the world more at my dot org and the listeners who support this n.p.r. Station. Will get to fresh air in a moment but 1st support for your State Public Radio comes from s b l entertainment presenting the Simon and Garfunkel story at the Paradise Performing Arts Center on October 2nd the performance features multimedia photos film footage and a full live band playing Mrs Robinson Cecilia and Bridge Over Troubled Water tickets and information at Paradise performing arts dot com. This is Fresh Air I'm Terry Gross this summer when President Trump proposed a 6th branch of the u.s. Military called the Space Force One of the 1st people the media turn to for reaction was our guest Neil de Grasse Tyson in the early 2000 Tyson served on a presidential commission on the future of the u.s. Aerospace industry where he worked with political leaders defense contractors and high ranking military leaders he's also well known as an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History and director of its Hayden Planetarium He's written several books including astrophysics for people in a hurry and he's hosted several popular t.v. And radio programs about the science of outer space lately he's been thinking about the centuries old relationship between scientists and the military it's a 2 way street he says while generals exploit technology developed by scientists for new weapons scientists and the rest of us benefit from technology developed for new weapon systems communication satellites launched and maintained by the u.s. Air Force the foundation of the g.p.s. System used in everything from ship navigation to pizza delivery Fresh Air's Dave Davies recently sat down with Tyson to talk about everything from the Space Force to the chance that a rogue asteroid may be headed towards earth and what we can do about it Tyson's new book with Natural History Museum research associate of a slang is called accessory to war the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military Well Neil de Grasse Tyson welcome back to Fresh Air Thanks for having me. A lot of the early parts of this book are explorations of how human civilizations have advanced in technological ways often. In connection with military activities or the pursuit of empire you know advances in navigation through the sextant and the magnetic compass and eventually telescopes do you find that these periods of advances in technology correspond significantly to periods of war do we do this more when a nation is focused on it for its own interests. So. It works both ways so 1st the blunt answer is yes any time a nation engages in war and they don't want to die where they feel threatened innovation picks up innovation stick get stimulated and solutions to not dying arise this has been true ever since there's been human conflict tribal human conflict from cave to cave while student a club with a narrow handle on one side and a big bulb on the other side that's easier to wield than holding it the other way or creating a stick where it's the same dimension from the front to the back so this is innovation and it's weaponry but you can also use it to hunt down your food right so so yes that's the case however what I can tell you is we are not we the astrophysicist are not waiting around for military advances to help us we're just plodding along doing our thing and what we realize and I try to make it clear in the book is that we're on a street and we walk in one direction the military walks in the other and there's like a picket fence between us and every now and then we look over and say hey that's a cool thing you guys just did is it declassified yet it will be in a year Ok call us when it is I want to use that to help me understand the universe . Meanwhile they look over from their side of the picket fence and say hey you've got some serious intellectual capital it's signed to this problem that they've been trying to solve for years and of course we publish it in peer review journals that are publicly available so they don't have to get our permission they can just take it and that's with them through if they needed a judgment it's in the interest of national security so it's just this too is this street where we look over each other's fence every now and then but they're not waiting around for us to innovate any more than we are for them but it happens in either case and for me the key part of this is for me my field is overwhelmingly liberal anti-war overwhelming 90 plus percent no doubt about it yet we are all curiously complicit when some technology arises from the war investment that could help our cause you know give us a. If there's a dot of light high up in the atmosphere it could be the afterburner of a missile headed our way the light if it's high up in the atmosphere and comes down to your detector and your telescope that light passes through many layers of air layers that are not all at the same temperature layers that are not all stable summers like turbulent Lee roiling and by the time that bit of light makes it through. The position of the thing in the sky does not precisely correspond with way you think it is from where the light came from. Even if it's stationary there Ok so if you want to shoot at it you could be just shooting out a phantom path of light that does not correspond with the location of the actual object and it's not fundamentally different from what happens when you put a stick a pencil in a glass of water and right at the boundary between the water in the air there's a bend in the pencil it looks like it's broken there but it's not like it's coming from different places when it reaches you from the water then when it reaches you from the air this is refraction that's doing that and different pockets of air in the atmosphere that have different temperatures refractor the air and have that same effect on points of light the military wants to hit its target and doesn't want to miss so they invented something called adaptive optics and it is a way of tracking what the air is doing and then compensating for it at your telescope that's doing the measuring it completely undoes the thing that made it bend and wiggle and jiggle so that when you aim for your target you hit. We don't know anything about this in national physics until one day at a national physics conference someone who is related to that study and those discoveries gave a paper on it and we said yeah we're taking it Ok and if it had finally become declassified and within days if not hours we were dropped we my colleagues were drawing up plans to to retrofit current telescopes to have adaptive optics on them and every new telescope built after that has adaptive optics as a fundamental part of its design and in that way this starlight we find no we're not shooting down the star but what happens is you take a long exposure and the starlight which would otherwise be in one spot starts meandering in that long exposure and if smears out in the final result what they look what the picture that star looks like and it completely dilutes the intensity and precision of the data you're collecting when we adopted adaptive optics it transformed modern astrophysics. So want to talk a bit about space exploration how we have managed it how it fits in here you write in the book that space has been politicized and militarized from the opening moments of the race to reach it what drove u.s. Efforts to explore space early on in the forty's fifty's yeah so the word explore is a is is kind of misleading it's a retrospective cleansing of what actually drove it in the 1st place we all remember the stirring words of John Kennedy will put a man on the moon return him safely to Earth before the decade is out in fact that's chiseled in the granite at Kennedy Space Center in Florida that's from a speech he gave to a joint session of Congress in May 1961 but if you go earlier in that speech just a couple of paragraphs earlier what he says is if the events of recent weeks he's referring to Yuri Gagarin the Soviet cosmonaut the 1st human in space so if the events of would even utter his name if the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere then we need to show the world the path to freedom over the path to tyranny. That's the war cry for going into space and ultimately that's what dislodge the money necessary to accomplish it not oh we're explorers and we're Americans and this is the next step No that would have been insufficient to make the investment we actually did to go into space we were at war and money flowed like rivers and of course I mean the space race really got going during the Cold War when the u.s. And Soviet Union were assembling these terrifying arsenals of nuclear weapons what was the military's attitude toward space was it the was it seen as a new theater of war did they want to deploy weapons in space so theatre of war doesn't have to mean weapons it could just mean a place that matters when you conduct your your your warfare and so what space and they build because you can now actually fly directly over other countries because you're not in their air space space became the ultimate high ground. Of reconnaissance of intelligence gathering and so it was immediately adopted for just that purpose and other utility as well for communication there their orbits that work for transmitting information from one continent to another special orbits the it's called geosynchronous orbit very high up and it the thing just is sort of parked up there and you reflect signals to it and then back down because that signal wouldn't otherwise move along the curvature of the earth but they do that does go in straight lines that can be reflected so so yes so there's a whole birth of a communication satellite industry that we still enjoy today but yes space was politicized and when I say militarized I don't mean weapons in space I mean reconnaissance in space and that feeds efforts on the ground when you're actually conducting military operations So yes it's been militarized ever since the beginning right we're speaking with Neil de Grasse Tyson whose new book with this lying is accessory to war the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military We'll continue our conversation after a short break this is Fresh Air I would like to know they have 3 of the newer mansion. Water Resources fake. What chemicals they bring the almond Archer's throughout the growing season what questions do you have about the North State let n.s.p. Our know and we'll answer them for you in our series since you asked submit your questions online and my n.s.p. Are dot org or call us at 433487. This is Fresh Air and we're speaking with Neil de Grasse Tyson he is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History and director of its Hayden Planetarium his new book with Museum research associate of a slaying is excess Arista war the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military there are a lot of fascinating details that emerge in this book and one of them that I love you write about you know at a time when satellites offered these possibilities of reconnaissance for the military and a big change occurred in the 1970 s. With the development of charge coupled devices I don't exactly get the science here but my sense is that this allowed images from satellites to be converted to digital files and then transmitted electronically to earth how did before that development how did the military retrieve the images that its satellites were collecting Yeah it's an interesting problem isn't it so in some cases they were just deorbit the satellite make sure it had a soft enough landing so that you go back in to get the film and didn't develop the film and then you'd have the images and of course that would engender the time delay getting the satellite finding the satellite developing it and by then the troop movement could be it could be too late if that's what it is you're monitoring or if there's a launch of a rocket it's too late the rocket already hit its target with digital detectors of course you can now beam the signal back down to earth and have that received and that signal is an image it's not fundamentally different from a fax when you think about it a fax is sending sort of zeros and ones and converting it into a a people might not remember what a fax is I just really. It's the same idea it's not the same technology but the same idea you're sending information that can be assembled into an image that created it in the 1st place and the c c D's. As an astrophysicist we would early out of the box using c.c. . It is because there are 100 times more sensitive to light than photographic film which means you can take shorter exposures and get the same integrity of data or you can take longer exposures and see things really really did him that you couldn't have ever even dreamt was there so we were early users of c.c.d. And they were very expensive in the day later on they got up. Picked up by cellphones and other sort of camcorder type recording devices and now there's a c.c.d. And every smartphone in the world that's and it's cheap so when humans learn to launch objects into space space adventure only objects with people in them I mean there were all kinds of possibilities this presented then and you're right that the United States and other countries had to figure out what its policy was going to be with respect to the military uses of space how did the government approach this question who decides Well all right so you go back to the 1960 s. When the space era was 10 years old so when out speaking of 1967 the un felt it necessary justifiably to come up with a peaceful use of Outer Space Treaty. And if you read this document whose title is much longer than I just recited to you its committee long Ok it right I think should've they needed some marketing folks to get in there but basically you can think of it as the treaty for the peaceful uses of outer space and in it it reads like coom by ya oh my gosh and we will go together and explore together and use the the results to benefit mankind and if one of your astronauts is in trouble I will come to their assistance and it's breeds beautifully and the spacefaring nations of the day were signatures to it and to this day last I checked is 107 participants in the treaty Oh by the end it prohibits weapons in space Ok it was very clear about that now here's the problem a fact it allows you to have defensive capability of your activities in space and all right so there's a gray area there what do we mean by that well let's say I'm a satellite and I'm going to nestle up next to your satellite and I have some radio to feel that will scramble your data and you don't want that to happen but you just see me ambling over towards you now you whip out your lasers and destroy me. Why I hadn't really done anything to you yet you feared that I would hurt you one satellite says to another and I just took you out is that a 1st strike is that aggression is that or is that used in a defensive way this is still a bit of