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When I imagine the future of space commerce, the first image that comes to mind is a farmers market on the International Space Station. This doesnt exist yet, but space commerce is a growing industry. The Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization for education and advocacy of space, estimates that the global space economy rose to $613 billion in 2024, up nearly 8% from 2023, and 250 times larger than all business at farmers markets in the United States. This number includes launch vehicles, satellite hardware, and services provided by these space-based assets, such as satellite phone or internet connection. Companies involved in spaceflight have been around since the start of the space age. By the 1980s, corporate space activity was gaining traction. President Ronald Reagan saw the need for a federal agency to oversee and guide this industry and created the Office of Space Commerce, or OSC. So what exactly does this office do and why is it important? As a space scientist, I am interested in how the U.S. regulates commercial activities in space. In addition, I teach a course on space policy. In class, we talk about the OSC and its role in the wider regulatory landscape affecting commercial use of outer space. The OSCs focus areas The Office of Space Commerce, an office of about 50 people, exists within the Department of Commerces National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. To paraphrase its mission statement, its chief purpose is to enable a robust U.S. commercial interest in outer space. OSC has three main focus areas. First, it is the office responsible for licensing and monitoring how private U.S. companies collect and distribute orbit-based images of Earth. There are many companies launching satellites with special cameras to look back down at the Earth these days. Companies offer a variety of data products and services from such imagery, for instance, to improve agricultural land use. A second primary job of OSC is space advocacy. OSC works with the other U.S. government agencies that also have jurisdiction over commercial use of outer space to make the regulatory environment easier. This includes working with the Federal Aviation Administration on launch licensing, the Federal Communications Commission on radio wavelength usage, and the Environmental Protection Agency on rules about the hazardous chemicals in rocket fuel. This job also includes coordinating with other countries that allow companies to launch satellites, collect data in orbit, and offer space-based services. In 2024, for example, the OSC helped revise the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, one of the main documents restricting the shipping of advanced technologies out of the country. This change removed some limitations, allowing American companies to export certain types of spacecraft to three countries: Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The OSC also coordinates commercial satellites flight paths in near-Earth space, which is its third and largest function. The Department of Defense keeps track of thousands of objects in outer space and issues alerts when the probability of a collision gets high. In 2018, President Donald Trump issued Space Policy Directive-3, which included tasking OSC to take this role over for nongovernment satellitesthat is, those owned by companies, not NASA or the military. The Department of Defense wants out of the job of traffic management involving privately owned satellites, and Trumps directive in 2018 started the process of handing off this task to OSC. To prevent satellites from colliding, OSC has been developing the traffic coordination system for space, known as TraCSS. It went into beta testing in 2024 and has some of the companies with the largest commercial constellationssuch as SpaceXs Starlinkparticipating. Progress on this has been slower than anticipated, though, and an audit in 2024 revealed that the plan is way behind schedule and perhaps still years away. Elevating OSC Deep in the text of Trumps August 13, 2025, executive order called Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry, theres a directive to elevate OSC to report directly to the office of the secretary of Commerce. This would make OSC equivalent to its current overseer, NOAA, with respect to importance and priority within the Department of Commerce. It would give OSC higher stature in setting more of the rules regarding commercial use of space, and it would make space commerce more visible across the broader economy. So why did Trump include this line about elevating OSC in his August 13 executive order? Back in 2018, Trump issued Space Policy Directive-2 during his first term, which included a task to create the Space Policy Advancing Commerce Enterprise Administration, or SPACE. SPACE would have been an entity reporting directly to the secretary of Commerce. While it was proposed as a bill in the House of Representatives later that year, it never became law. The August 13 executive order essentially directs the Department of Commerce to make this move now. Should the secretary of Commerce enact the order, it would bypass the role of Congress in promoting OSC. The 60-day window that Trump placed in the executive order for making this change has closed, but with the government shutdown it is unclear whether the elevation of OSC might still occur. Troubles for OSC While all of this sounds good for promoting space as a place for commercial activity, OSC has been under stress in 2025. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency targeted NOAA for cuts, including firing eight people from OSC. Because about half of the people working in OSC are contractors, this represented a 30% reduction of force. In March, Trumps presidential budget request for the 2026 fiscal year proposed a cut of 85% of the $65 million annual budget of OSC. In July, space industry leaders urged Congress to restore funding to OSC. The August 13 executive order appeared to be good news for OSC. On September 9, however, Bloomberg reported that the Department of Commerce requested a 40% rescission to OSCs fiscal year 2025 budget. Rescissions are clawbacks of funds already approved and appropriated by Congress. The promised funding is essentially put on hold. Once proposed by the president, rescissions have to be voted on by both chambers of Congress to be enacted. This must occur within 45 days, or before the end of the fiscal year, which was September 30. This rescission request came so close to that deadline that Congress did not act to stop it. As a result, OSC lost this funding. The loss could mean additional cutbacks to staff and perhaps even a shrinking of its focus areas. Will OSC be elevated? Will OSC be restructured or even dismantled? The future is still uncertain for this office. Michael Liemohn is a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Amazon is well aware that youre spending hours agonizing over the reviews for seven different near-identical toaster ovens before you actually make a decision. Now, it has an AI feature for thatand we have to admit, its pretty helpful. Help me decide is a new AI shopping function that rolled out on October 23 across millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon shopping app and mobile browser. It uses large language models and AI tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite of offerings to analyze your shopping history, purchase details, and preferences, and then match those insights with product details and customer reviews to recommend products that you might be most interested in. Designed to cut down on shopper indecision and usher users straight to the checkout cart, the feature is a smart move for Amazon, and it might make holiday shopping a bit less tortuous for customers. As the worlds most popular online retail site continues to roll out new AI features, its serving as a proving ground for how AI is radically reshaping online shopping as we know it. How to use Amazon’s new “Help me decide” feature To try out Help me decide, you can either navigate to the Keep shopping for tab on the Amazon homepage, or just click on a bunch of related products until you see a black pop-up with a sparkle icon. From there, the tool will select the product that it deems best of your recently viewed based on customer reviews, your personal product criteria, and prices and return rates. Its selection includes an AI-generated summary of why you should commit to its choice, highlighting the most relevant product features and including one stand-out review of the item. At the bottom of the screen, you can also toggle to two other suggestions: one budget pick, on the lower end of the price spectrum, and one upgrade pick, if youre inclined to get spendy. “Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after youve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision, Daniel Lloyd, vice president of Personalization at Amazon, said in a press release. I gave the tool a try after spending the past several days window shopping for cat trees that are definitely outside my budget. True to its description, Help me decide picked a tree in the middle of the price range (still $99.98), describing it as the ultimate choice for your furry friends indoor adventure. The summary went on to describe the trees impressive 70-inch height, spacious hammock, and removable top perch that ensures easy cleaning. Despite the flowery language used in the AI summaries, I found the tool generally helpful and easy to use. How AI is changing online shopping The Help me decide add-on is the latest in a growing bevy of AI shopping features from Amazon. These include the companys AI shopping assistant, Rufus; an Interests feature that tracks personalized shopping categories; and AI-generated review highlights that give top notes on customer reactions to products. Over the past several months, brands including Ralph Lauren and Pinterest have invested in their own AI tools to drive online shopping. Walmart and Sams Club have partnered with OpenAI to allow customers to shop from within the chatbot. And the AI-powered app Daydream is purpose-built to help users find the perfect outfits. In a recent Adobe Analytics study on holiday shopping behaviors, the company shared that 2024 was the first time it noticed a measurable surge in AI traffic to U.S. retail sites before the holidays. Now, its expecting a major escalation of that trend, estimating that holiday AI traffic to retail sites will rise by 520% in 2025. AI is quietly rewiring the way we shopboth in subtle ways, like by improving product recommendations, and in more direct ways, like via AI chatbots that can literally shop on behalf of a user. It won’t be long until every part of the online shopping experience is guided, at least in some way, by a dedicated AI model.
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E-Commerce
The kinds of videos that do well on YouTube Shorts are depressingly predictable: cute cats, heated arguments, crazy stunts, and plenty of good old-fashioned shots of people suffering low-key injuries. The issue is that the real world produces only so many epic fails. And of the small number that do happen, even fewer are caught on video. Think of all the airplane passenger arguments and dropped wedding cakes that have gone untaped and unposted! Enter Sora. OpenAIs new video generator is hyperrealistic, and was clearly trained on billions of hours of short-form, vertical video. That makes it incredibly good at generating the kinds of short, grabby videos that pull in our attention and manipulate our emotions. How do I know? I used Sora to create an entirely fake YouTube channel, populated with AI-generated versions of the kinds of videos I see on YouTube Shorts and TikTok all the time. It took me about 30 minutes to build and it cost nothing. In less than a week, I have 21,400 views and counting. Lets dig in. Slop by the bucketful Getting access to OpenAIs Sora social network is hard. The platform launched as an invite-only app, and despite this hurdle quickly ballooned to more than 5 million active users. Its growing even faster than ChatGPT. Once youre into Sora, though, using Sora 2 (the actual video generation model behind it) is extremely easy. You just type in the concept for a video, and Sora 2 writes the script, generates about 11 seconds of very realistic vertical video, and even adds synchronized audio. The app struggles with beautiful, cinematic footage. In my early testing, Googles rival Veo 3.1which the tech behemoth launched to compete with Sora 2is much better at that. But where Sora 2 succeeds is in generating emotionally charged, short-form vertical videos. The model was likely built to drive the Sora social video network, and it shows. I decided to test the appeal of Sora 2s videos by moving them over to a traditional short-form video platform so they could compete in the real world against actual grabby, vertical clips. To that end, I opened up Sora 2 and started typing in ideas for emotionally heated videos at random. I quickly found that Sora 2 can work with either very detailed or very vague ideas. For one video, I used ChatGPT to write a detailed script for a complex scenario: a woman making a phone call in order to reconnect with her estranged mother. Sora 2s video nailed the task. From the subtle jump cuts to the swelling music (again, entirely AI-generated), its 11 seconds of surprisingly powerful micro-cinema. For other videos, I went much simpler, letting Sora 2 run with my basic prompt. The text two roommates have an argument, cellphone video yielded this: Entering A man mistakenly knocks over a giant, beautiful wedding cake and people are shocked, realistic cellphone video produced this gem, which is my favorite Sora video so far: In total, I created eight videos. Each one took about 60 seconds to generate. Using Sora 2 within the Sora app is currently free. Basically, the system generates AI slop by the bucketful. Your job is simply to give the model direction and scoop up its output. Cat fail arbitrage You can post your AI slop directly to Sora itself. But I wasnt content to stop there. Instead, I wanted to see how these videos would do in the real world. So I went over to YouTube and started uploading them to the platforms YouTube Shorts sectionbasically YouTubes clone of TikTok. Rather than starting a channel entirely from scratch, I used a neglected one where I had previously posted videos of my dog, Lance. It had no traffic to speak of, and only a handful of videos, mostly uploaded to share with friends and family members. The channel felt like an ideal blank slate; it wasnt entirely newI was worried that YouTube might flag and delete a fully new channel that started posting AI content right out of the gatebut hadnt been developed at all. I could thus test what would happen if an existing YouTuber suddenly started posting nothing but Soras delightful slop. I uploaded each of my new videos. Crucially, I didnt want to deceive anyone, so I left Soras prominent watermarks in place. I also fully disclosed that the videos are AI generated, using YouTubes Altered Content flag. It doesnt seem to have mattered. As I write this about a week later, my videos have already received 21,400 views. Poor little Lances best video had gotten only 2,600 views in the three years since I posted it. My top video from Sorathe one of the wedding cake fallingis at 12,000 views and counting. Containment is impossible AI-generated videos wouldnt be so much of a threat to the traditional social media landscape if they staye put. You could go to Sora for AI-generated fails, and TikTok or YouTube Shorts for the authentic ones. My experiment proves that this containment is unrealistic. Its shockingly easy to move videos from Sora to other vertical video platforms. And despite disclosures and watermarks, users seem to engage with the AI videos just as much as they would with real ones. Sora the social network is also a pared-down experience when it comes to running the Sora 2 model. In its new API, OpenAI provides developers with direct access to Sora 2, including customizable video lengths and aspect ratios. Videos generated through the API cost $0.10 per second. They have no distinguishable watermarks. It took me only about 20 minutes to code up an integration in Python, and I was creating fully automated AI slop for about $1 per video, at scale. All thats to say: YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are about to be inundated with an unstoppable deluge of this stuff. YouTube tacitly admitted that when it introduced its Altered Content flag over a year ago. At the time, AI video was so janky and unusable that YouTubers were confused as to why anyone would need to disclose AI contents origins. Now we know. For consumers, the message is clear. From here on out, trust nothing that you see on vertical video apps. That amazing bottle flip or delightfully juicy neighbor fight clip may well have emerged not from real life, but from the endless slop bucket of Sora 2.
Category:
E-Commerce
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