By Flint Jurgens

A 42 year-old entrepreneur who was the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space is on his way to becoming the head of Nasa. Jared Isaacman won approval from a key Senate committee and now only needs to clear a vote of the full chamber to lead an agency that has set its sights on returning to the moon. While he is expected to win that vote, the billionaire with ties Elon Musk has encountered scepticism. Members of both parties asked at his confirmation hearing about possible conflicts of interest, his desire to send astronauts to Mars, and budget cuts. President Donald Trump has said Mr Isaacman's leadership will pave the way "for groundbreaking achievements" in science and technology. The committee voted 19 to 9 to send his nomination to the full chamber, with most of the votes against him coming from Democrats. Mr Isaacman, along with Space X's Elon Musk and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, is among a new wave of billionaires who have been challenging the old order in space. They have accelerated the pace of innovation and are aiming to dramatically reduce the cost of human space travel. He'll be expected to do the same at Nasa, whose space programmes are regarded by private sector operators as wasteful and often significantly over budget. Mr Isaacman has said that the major aerospace contractors are "incentivised to be economically inefficient". He has made it clear he would like to expand the human spaceflight programme at the agency. In a confirmation hearing on 9 April, Mr Isaacman said he hoped to pursue the Artemis mission to the moon, as well as potential missions to Mars. But lawmakers feared he would sacrifice the long-planned moon mission to focus on Mars. He sought to reassure them that the two were related and "we could be paralleling these efforts and doing the near-impossible". "We will prioritise sending American astronauts to Mars and along the way we will inevitably have the capabilities to return to the moon," he said. "We don't have to make a binary decision of moon versus Mars, or moon has to come first versus Mars," he later added. During the confirmation process, it emerged that he had been arrested at the Canadian border in 2010 and returned to Nevada to face charges that he had passed bad checks to casinos. In a questionnaire, Mr Isaacman said that the dispute with the Palms Casino in Las Vegas stemmed from a travel reimbursement that the resort promised but failed to deliver. He added that the issue was resolved in 24 hours, with charges dismissed and court records sealed. On the day of his nomination in December, Mr Isaacman posted a statement on X that gave an early glimpse into his vision: "This second space age has only just begun." "There will inevitably be a thriving space economy – one that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space," he wrote. "At Nasa, we will… usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilisation."

By Mathias Henry

Former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams is among a number of authors whose books may have been accessed by technology company Meta to train their latest AI (artificial intelligence) model.

Mr Adams said the books had "been used without his permission", and the matter is now with his solicitor.

An investigation by The Atlantic magazine revealed Meta may have accessed millions of pirated books and research papers through LibGen - Library Genesis - to train its generative AI (Gen-AI) system, Llama.

A spokesperson for Meta said: "We respect third-party intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law."

The Atlantic magazine also published a database of books that had been pirated by LibGen, so many authors have been able to find out if their work appears on the site.

When BBC News NI searched the database a number of authors from Northern Ireland appeared on the list, including Jan Carson, Lynne Graham, Deric Henderson, and Booker prize winner Anna Burns.

Authors from around the world have been organising campaigns to encourage governments to intervene.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is currently defending a court case brought by multiple authors over the use of their work.

'Most lucrative act of theft in history'

Michael Taylor, a historian from Ballymena, said it is "infuriating" that Meta may have used his work.

Two of his books, The Interest and Impossible Monsters, both appear on the LibGen database.

"Writers spend years on their books, and contrary to what anybody thinks, very few people make enough money out of writing to live by their pen," he said.

"Meta might be worth more than a trillion dollars, and it might be politically untouchable, but by violating the copyright of so many thousands of books, its actions amount to the single greatest and the most lucrative act of theft in history."

Prof Monica McWilliams is an academic and former politician who has written extensively about the Northern Ireland peace process and domestic violence.

More than 20 of her academic papers and books appear on the database, including those on intimate partner violence and domestic violence against women during conflict.

She said when it came to her attention, she found it "quite shocking".

"The first principle in the academic world is that you direct your reader to your source material, and that isn't happening here," she said.

"It begs the question of what does copyright even mean anymore.

Prof McWilliams donates the royalties from sales of her writing to domestic violence charities like Women's Aid.

"If royalties are not being paid for the work to be used, then ultimately it is the charities that will lose out."

Last week, authors gathered in London to protest against Meta's actions and high profile authors including Kate Mosse, Richard Osman, and Val McDermid signed an open letter calling on the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to bring Meta management to parliament.

Posting on X, Richard Osman, who wrote the popular Thursday Murder Club series, said: "Copyright law is not complicated at all. If you want to use an author's work you need to ask for permission.

"If you use it without permission you're breaking the law. It's so simple.

"It'll be incredibly difficult for us, and for other affected industries, to take on Meta, but we'll have a good go!"

What is Llama?

Llama is a large language model, or LLM, similar to Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

The systems are fed huge amounts of data and trained to spot patterns within it. They use this data to create passages of text by predicting the next word in a sequence.

Despite the systems being labelled intelligent, critics argue LLMs do not "think", have no understanding of what they produce and can confidently present errors as fact.

Tech companies argue that they need more data to make the systems more reliable, but authors, artists, and other creatives say they should pay for the privilege.