It wasn’t all bad
■ When Carnegie Mellon student Nikolai Stefanov first heard about a school club that planned to send a rover to the moon, he knew virtually nothing about spacecraft and offered to fetch coffee for the team. Three years later, he’s the mission control director, responsible for ensuring the rover’s success after it hitches a ride on a commercial lunar lander next month. If successful, Stefanov and his 300-person team will be the first private group to land a rover on an extraterrestrial body—and will have beaten NASA’s own robot rovers to the moon.
■ Thirty-one Ukrainian children were reunited with their families last week, months after they were forcibly sent to Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea.Thirteen mothers traveling in a group braved a complex and harrowing journey through Poland and Belarus to bring the children back, in a mission coordinated by the humanitarian group Save Ukraine. Of some 19,500 Ukrainian children illegally taken to Russia, so far 360 have returned home; many had been told by Russia that their parents no longer wanted them.The children crossed the Russia-Belarus border on foot, then traveled by bus to Kyiv. “I cried when I saw my mom from the bus,” said one of the children, Bogdan, 13. “We went to the summer camp for two weeks, but we got stuck there for six months.”
■ Novice pilotTaylor Hash was taking off from a Pontiac, Mich., runway when she sent a startling message over the radio: Her front wheel had fallen off, and she’d have to perform an emergency landing. Veteran pilot ChrisYates was flying nearby and immediately began to advise the 21-year-old, on only her third solo flight. “My daughter’s name isTaylor, and I taught her to fly,” he said over the radio. WithYates’ guidance, Hash circled the airport to calm her nerves, then eased her back tires onto the runway. “This is a good [start] to your legacy, kid,”Yates said.