Multiple billionaires are sure to be watching when the Vulcan rocket lifts off for the first time, as soon as next week.
Built through a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., the new vehicle is poised to take on Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) and ferry satellites and cargo for the likes of the Pentagon, NASA and even Amazon.com Inc.
Vulcan is also helping fuel takeover offers for the company building it, the United Launch Alliance. Among them is a multibillion-dollar bid from Blue Origin LLC, the ambitious space venture run by billionaire Jeff Bezos, according to people familiar with the matter.
It’s a pivotal moment for ULA, a once-dominant launch provider for the United States government whose star has faded in recent years. With SpaceX now leading the commercial market and making inroads with the government on the strength of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, ULA finds itself needing to adapt to avoid being left behind.
“SpaceX likes to say they have a monopoly” in the launch market, Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, said in October. “They don’t.”
Vulcan, set to debut early Jan. 8 after almost a decade in development, enters a market starved for more capacity. The rocket is meant to be a cheaper, all-American alternative to ULA’s legacy Atlas and Delta vehicles to carry the government’s highest profile satellites.
If Vulcan proves it can fly — and then fly again and again — the vehicle is the company’s best hope to gain ground on Musk’s launch behemoth. ULA, which also aims to build out the commercial side of its business, has already signed contracts worth billions for roughly 70 Vulcan missions.
ULA was formed by Boeing and Lockheed in 2006. The pioneering venture had “a virtual monopoly on U.S. government launches” in those early years, said George Sowers, the company’s former chief scientist. Those contracts were sweetened with extra money to ensure the Defense Department could maintain access to space at a time when there were few viable launch providers.
But the ownership structure — with two publicly traded companies that compete for defence contracts — also muddied its strategy. Sowers, who’s now a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, likened it to “being owned by the Hatfields and McCoys.”
“Trying to get them to agree on anything at the level of the board of directors was nearly impossible,” he said.
Unlike newer launch rivals that have tapped the public and private markets for capital in pursuit of ambitious new technologies, ULA doesn’t get cash infusions from investors, according to Bruno. That has forced the CEO to keep the company’s operations and staff lean.
Now, ULA must execute an increasingly busy flight schedule in the coming years with even fewer launch operations personnel after recent layoffs, a person familiar with the matter said. ULA’s head count is hovering around 2,300 employees, the person said, compared with the more than 10,000 employees at both SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Last summer, ULA laid off some 75 people, roughly 40 per cent of launch operations staff at its Vandenberg Space Force Base site in California and around 12 per cent at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is private.
“We work in an extremely competitive industry and as a company we continue to evolve to meet emerging mission requirements,” Ron Fortson, director and general manager of ULA Launch Operations, told employees in an Aug. 13 email announcing the layoffs seen by Bloomberg. “Due to strategic business alignments, we determined that a reduction in force was necessary.”
A ULA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
The timing, coinciding with the debut of Vulcan, offers bidders a glimpse of ULA’s future. Aside from Blue Origin, potential buyers include private equity giant Cerberus and aviation manufacturer Textron Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported last month.
The Vulcan program extends back to 2015, when ULA decided to move on from the decades-old Atlas V rocket, which used engines made in Russia. By that time, relying on Russia was becoming increasingly untenable for Western companies, especially for a U.S. contractor like ULA tasked with launching spy satellites.
For Vulcan, the company opted for Blue Origin-made engines, which became a more palatable option to lawmakers. But switching providers and pursuing new designs came with challenges. ULA had originally hoped to launch Vulcan as early as 2019, but Blue Origin didn’t deliver the hardware until late 2022. Then ULA suffered another setback last March after a Vulcan part exploded on a test stand.
The stakes are high for ULA, which plans seven Vulcan launches in 2024, and then expects to double that cadence by the first half of 2025. It’s an ambitious schedule, especially since new rockets are notoriously slow to ramp up.
ULA is scheduled to handle about two dozen national security launches over the next two to three years, and Bruno said a working Vulcan will let it compete again for NASA contracts. The rocket also is in line for 38 launches on behalf of Amazon to send its Project Kuiper internet satellites into orbit.
In building a commercial business to complement its government work, ULA is trying to position itself as a price-competitive alternative to other providers. Though critics have lambasted the lack of reusability in ULA’s rockets and the relatively higher price tag for launches — with Musk once calling the company “a complete waste of taxpayer money.”
Bruno wouldn’t reveal how much ULA plans to charge, but he said Vulcan launches would “be very competitive with SpaceX.”
Aside from pricing, ULA says Vulcan’s biggest advantage is that it’s optimized for so-called high-energy missions — flights that need to take larger payloads directly to very high orbits.
“No one has chosen to design for that; we have,” Bruno said, arguing that the Falcon 9 is better-suited for low-Earth-orbit flights. High-energy missions are “pretty much exclusively for the government,” he said.
It’s a critical stretch for ULA, which has a new vehicle and little room for error before jumping into a busy flight schedule.
“That’s a change to your whole launch operations,” said Chaplain, the space analyst. “Can they do that?”
— With assistance from Kiel Porter.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
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