IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna announced Gerstner’s death in an email sent Sunday to employees, but did not provide a cause of death.

“Lou arrived at IBM at a moment when the company’s future was genuinely uncertain. His leadership during that period reshaped the company. Not by looking backward, but by focusing relentlessly on what our clients would need next,” Krishna said in his email.

Louis Gerstner, shown here in 1993, led the company for nine years. Reuters

Gerstner moved to IBM from being the CEO of RJR Nabisco in April 1993 after stints at American Express and the consultancy McKinsey, becoming the first outsider to run Big Blue, as IBM was called.

During the nine years he led the computer giant, he was widely credited with turning around a company that was facing potential bankruptcy, pivoting the company to business services. He radically changed IBM’s culture and focus while slashing expenses, selling assets and repurchasing stock.

Gerstner retired as CEO of IBM in 2002, with the stock some 800% higher than when he had started, moving to become the chairman of Carlyle Group until his retirement in 2008.

The author of “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance” and co-author of “Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools,” Gerstner was on the board of several companies including Bristol-Myers, the New York Times, American Express, AT&T and Caterpillar.

IBM’s headquarters in Armonk, N.Y. Askar – stock.adobe.com

Gerstner was passionate about public education in the US, launching an initiative at IBM to use company technology in schools.

He established the Gerstner Philanthropies in 1989, which included the Gerstner Family Foundation, emphasizing support for biomedical research, environmental and education initiatives, and social services serving New York City, Boston, and Palm Beach County, Florida.

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NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.

Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over.

But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.

On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s spacecraft die.

A quarter-million miles away, the sun had already set on Mare Crisium, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.

For the solar-powered spacecraft, the hours remaining were numbered and few.

“I think the mood generally is pretty light,” Ray Allensworth, the spacecraft program director at Firefly, said that afternoon. “I think people are just excited and also just kind of relieved to see how well the mission went and just kind of taking a moment to enjoy the last few hours with the lander.”

Scientists with cargo on the other commercial moon missions had invested years of effort and ended up with little or nothing. Those NASA assigned to Blue Ghost are coming away with a cornucopia of new data to work with.

Robert Grimm, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who led one of the scientific payloads, acknowledged his good fortune. “Better than being a crater,” he said.

One of the NASA experiments had collected data just as Blue Ghost landed. Four cameras captured views from different angles of the exhaust of the spacecraft’s thrusters as they kicked up lunar dust and carved a small crater.

“This gives us the ability with these cameras to measure three-dimensional shapes,” said Paul Danehy, one of the scientists working on the project known as Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies, or SCALPSS.

Engineers want to understand those dynamics to prevent potential disasters when bigger and heavier spacecraft like SpaceX’s Starship land astronauts on the moon. If NASA sets up a lunar outpost, spacecraft will return to that site more than once. Rocks flying upward could knock out an engine on a descending spacecraft or damage nearby structures.

In early looks at the photographs, one of the surprises is that the exhaust plume from the thrusters started kicking lunar dust when Blue Ghost was still about 50 feet above the surface, higher than expected. The same camera system is to record the dust cloud from a much larger lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1, which Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, plans to send to the moon later this year.

NASA not only wants to understand lunar dust, or regolith, but also how to get rid of it. The particles can be sharp and abrasive like shards of glass, posing a hazard to machinery and astronauts. An experiment on Blue Ghost called the Electrodynamic Dust Shield used electric fields to clean dust off surfaces.

Two experiments collected information that should cast light on the moon’s interior.

Dr. Grimm’s payload was the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder, the first of its kind deployed on the surface of another world.

To deploy, spring-loaded launchers flung four probes about the size of soup cans in four different directions. Connected by cables to the lander, the probes worked like supersized voltmeters. A second component, raised atop an eight-foot-high mast, measured magnetic fields.

Together, these readings reveal naturally occurring variations in electric and magnetic fields that tell how easily electric currents flow deep underground, and that tells something about what is down there. The conductivity of colder rocks, for example, is lower.

Blue Ghost also deployed a pneumatic drill, using bursts of nitrogen gas to excavate dirt. A needle at the end of the instrument measured temperature and how easily heat flows through the material. Because of rocks in the way, the drill went down only about three feet, not the 10 feet that had been hoped.

In videos, “you can see the rocks flying out and sparks,” said Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built the drill.

Still, three feet was deep enough for the scientific measurements, Dr. Zacny said. Data from the drill and the magnetotelluric sounder could both give hints about how the moon and other rocky worlds formed or why the near side of the moon looks so different from the far side.

“It’s really a basic question about lunar geology we’re trying to answer,” Dr. Grimm said.

Honeybee, which is part of Blue Origin, also built a second device called PlanetVac to demonstrate a simplified technology to collect samples. This device used compressed gas to stir up regolith into a small tornado and direct it into a container.

The technology will be used on a robotic Japanese space mission known as Martian Moons Exploration, which will bring back samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars.

“The fact that it worked on the moon gives us confidence that it should work on Phobos as well,” Dr. Zacny said.

Brian Walsh’s experiment on Blue Ghost did not look at the moon but back at Earth.

“It’s a really good vantage point,” said Dr. Walsh, a professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University.

Dr. Walsh is interested in the magnetic bubble that deflects solar wind particles around Earth. His telescope recorded X-rays emitted when high-speed particles from the sun slam into atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The boundary between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind is like two sumo wrestlers pushing against each other. The view from afar should help scientists tell whether that boundary shifts slowly or in sudden leaps.

That is important because it affects how well Earth’s magnetic field protects us from occasional gargantuan belches of charged particles that bombard the planet during solar storms.

“We’re trying to figure out how that gate opens and how energy spills through,” Dr. Walsh said.

Blue Ghost has already left a lasting impression.

Maria Banks said that as she left the mission operations center each night, she would look up at the moon hanging in the sky.

“Which would just basically stop me in my tracks every day,” Dr. Banks said. “I don’t think I’ll ever see the moon the same again, because for the rest of my life, Firefly’s lander and our instruments will be up there.”

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The moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface.

The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday.

When is the landing and how can I watch it?

The landing is scheduled for 3:45 a.m. Eastern time on March 2. Firefly will begin live coverage of the landing at 2:20 a.m. from its YouTube channel.

What is Blue Ghost’s destination?

This mission is headed to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

What is Blue Ghost taking to the moon?

The lander is carrying a variety of scientific and experimental payloads to the lunar surface, including 10 for NASA. Those include a drill to measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean off glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.

That cargo is part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Service, or CLPS, which aims to put NASA equipment on the moon at a cheaper price than if NASA built its own lunar lander. The agency will pay Firefly $101.5 million if all 10 payloads reach the lunar surface, and a bit less if the mission does not fully succeed.

Blue Ghost is the third CLPS mission to launch to the moon. The first, in 2024, from Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, failed after launching. The second, by Intuitive Machines of Houston last year, reached the moon but tipped over.

Why is the landing occurring at such an early hour?

The physics of getting to a certain place in the solar system at a certain time does not always match when people will be awake to watch. The Blue Ghost lander spacecraft gets its power from solar panels, and thus the mission is aiming to land soon after the dawn of a new lunar day. And to get to Mare Crisium on March 2, the landing time turns out to be 3:45 a.m.

“That’s just when that happens,” said Ray Allensworth, the program manager for Blue Ghost at Firefly.

The mission is to last about 14 Earth days until lunar sunset.

How has the mission gone so far?

Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft’s systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on Feb. 13. The spacecraft’s cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon’s cratered surface.

A few small glitches have come up along the way, but no major malfunctions. Mostly, the mission controllers made adjustments as they learned how the spacecraft behaved in the space environment.

“Thermal alarms might go off,” Ms. Allensworth said. “Things are getting a little hotter than planned, a little colder than planned on the vehicle. You want to look at that data and see is it actually OK.”

What happened to the other lunar lander that launched with Blue Ghost?

On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. The two missions are separate, but Ispace, seeking a cheaper ride to space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload. That turned out to be the Blue Ghost launch.

Although Resilience launched at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.

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Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, is laying off roughly 10 percent of its work force, according to an email that was sent to staff on Thursday and that was viewed by The New York Times.

The cuts, which could affect about 1,000 roles, follow several years of rapid growth and the successful launch last month of New Glenn, the company’s massive reusable rocket.

Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said in the email that the company had become bloated, and that the cuts would be in engineering, research and development, project management, and general managerial layers.

He added that Blue Origin’s leaders had determined that their priority for 2025 and beyond was “to scale our manufacturing output and launch cadence with speed, decisiveness and efficiency for our customers.”

Blue Origin does not disclose how many employees it has, but its work force is widely estimated to be more than 10,000 people.

Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has poured billions into Blue Origin. He has long described a vision of establishing human colonies in space, and said bringing down the cost of launching cargo into space was critical. But his company has lagged behind the development of Elon Musk’s private space company, SpaceX.

In late 2023, Mr. Bezos hired Mr. Limp, a former senior Amazon executive, to run Blue Origin and instill it with a sense of urgency. The company, flush with money from Mr. Bezos, had been in a perpetual research-and-development cycle, said Chad Anderson, a start-up investor at Space Capital.

“When you have an unlimited amount of money, you don’t have that same sense of scarcity and necessity,” Mr. Anderson said.

Employees had been bracing for layoffs for some time. Late Wednesday, they received an invitation for a virtual meeting at 7 a.m. on Thursday. In the eight-minute session, Mr. Limp announced the cuts. At 7:10, he followed up with a companywide email confirming the layoffs.

Mr. Limp said in the email that the company would still hire “hire hundreds of positions.”

During an appearance on Wednesday at the Commercial Space Conference in Washington, D.C., Mr. Limp was upbeat about Blue Origin and gave no hint that he was about to say goodbye to one in every 10 employees.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we have made a lot of progress in the past year on the fundamentals and acting quickly and turning us into a world-class manufacturing company,” Mr. Limp said. “I think we’ve made some progress. We have a lot to do this year, too.”

The rate of manufacture of the BE-4 engines — used for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and the Vulcan rocket built by United Launch Alliance — has ramped up to about one a week. “And by the way, that’s going to double or triple over the next 12 to 18 months,” he added.

Blue Origin is on track for launching a lander to the moon this year, Mr. Limp said. Although this one will carry only cargo, not people, it will test technologies that will be used for a larger lander that Blue Origin is developing for NASA and its Artemis program.

“We’ve hit all our milestones,” Mr. Limp said. “We’re still on track, subject to Artemis schedule.”

Mr. Limp said that even this smaller lander would be bigger than anything else that had landed on the moon, including the landers used by NASA astronauts during the Apollo program.

Mr. Limp was also bullish on the space plans of the Trump administration, even if those space plans are not clear yet. “The increased focus on space just in the first month of this administration is great to see,” he said. “We’re obviously huge fans.”

Even if NASA pivots its attention from the moon to Mars — the preferred destination of Mr. Musk — Blue Origin’s technologies will be suited for that longer journey, too. “You can treat them a little bit like Lego bricks,” Mr. Limp said. “It turns out a manned mission to Mars or a cargo mission to Mars reuses the vast majority of these.”

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The California Air Resources Board (CARB) — which consists of board members appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrat-controlled legislature — is scheduled to vote just days after the election on a new proposal that would lower carbon emissions faster, but increase the cost of petroleum refineries.

CARB has the authority to impose regulations without legislative oversight.

Twenty-five Republicans are sounding the alarm and urging the board to delay the vote after an independent finding showed it could increase the cost at the pump per gallon by 47 cents.

“It’s a big, big deal, and so people deserve to know and have full transparency by these boards, what it is that they’re doing and the impact that it will have on their daily life,” state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, R-Yucaipa, told Fox News Digital in an interview.

“So, we talk about the cost of living in California. We talk about the top concerns in California is the cost of living, and when it comes to the impact of fuels, this would be a direct ripple effect on increasing the cost of living in California. People need a break.”

In a letter to CARB chair Liane Randolph, Ochoa Bogh and Assemblymember Greg Wallis noted that Californians currently pay $1.50 more per gallon than the national average, and CARB’s proposed changes could add 65 to 85 cents next year, potentially reaching $1.50 by 2035.

Californians may see another tax hike after they are already paying the highest tax prices in the U.S. AFP via Getty Images

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) — which consists of board members appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, plan to vote on a new proposal that would lower carbon emissions faster, but increase the cost of petroleum refineries. Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

CARB has the power to put those regulations into effect without legislative oversight, which has GOP lawmakers sounding the alarm and wanting the board to delay the vote. REUTERS

“What we’re asking is that before you take a vote on new standards that are going to obviously have an impact on fuel prices, give us full disclosure as to what exactly it is that you’re imposing and what the financial impact will be on Californians,” Ochoa Bogh said.

CARB initially estimated a 47-cent-per-gallon increase in gas prices for public comment, but retracted the estimate after receiving massive backlash.

The CARB report foresaw gasoline prices increasing due to the Low Carbon Fuel Standard reforms that were created in 2007, likely rising by 47 cents next year and 52 cents by 2026.

Diesel prices could climb by 59 cents this year and 66 cents in two years. Long-term projections suggest gasoline could surge by $1.15 and diesel by $1.50 per gallon from 2031 to 2046, with jet fuel increasing by $1.21.

The air board staff later called the gas price hike projections “incomplete” in a December report, focusing instead on the cost savings to drivers as more people transition to electric vehicles.

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