October 25, 2020

Astronaut Kate Rubins Just Voted From Space

A feel-good story about voting in 2020? You got it.

NASA

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NASA astronaut Kate Rubins didn’t let a pesky thing like space travel stop her from casting a ballot in this year’s hotly contested election. Instead, she cast her ballot from space.

The agency apparently has a “vote as you float” policy for its astronauts, which enabled Rubin to vote while on her mission. In this case, Rubins went into a makeshift voting booth in the International Space Station and submitted a specialized electronic ballot.

The process itself is fairly complex. Astronauts have to signal before they leave Earth for their missions if they intend to vote or not, and then the county clerk from their home district sends a test to NASA’s Johnson Space Center to make sure the process is working. After that, a secure ballot is sent to the astronaut via email. 

Millions of Americans have voted early, and many more are braving the pandemic to vote in person. Election day is November 3.

 

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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