The stakes have never been higher for Elon Musk’s SpaceX. On Wednesday, the company will attempt to launch two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in a mission called Demo-2.
It will mark the first time in history that a commercial aerospace company has carried humans into Earth’s orbit. NASA and space fans have waited nearly a decade for this milestone, which will usher in the return of human spaceflight to US soil.
The launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is moving forward despite the Covid-19 pandemic, which has shuttered both private and government operations across the U.S. NASA says it must carry on with the mission in order to keep the International Space Station, a giant orbiting laboratory, fully staffed with US astronauts.
The space agency’s top official, Jim Bridenstine, also said he hopes this launch will inspire awe and uplift the general public during the ongoing health crisis.
Why is this important?
The United States hasn’t launched its own astronauts into space since the Space Shuttle Program ended in 2011. Since then, NASA’s astronauts have had to travel to Russia and train on the country’s Soyuz spacecraft. Those seats have cost NASA as much as US$86 million each.
But the space agency chose not to create its own replacement for the Shuttle. Instead, it asked the private sector to develop a spacecraft capable of safely ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station — a controversial decision considering that NASA had never before outsourced the development of a human-rated spacecraft. The thinking was that commercial companies could drive down costs and spur innovation, and NASA would have more time and resources to focus on exploring deeper into the solar system.
In 2014, NASA awarded two contracts: $4.2 billion for Boeing to build its Starliner vehicle, and $2.6 billion to SpaceX, which planned to create a crew worthy version of the Dragon spacecraft that was already flying cargo to and from the International Space Station. NASA had already put money toward SpaceX’s development of the Dragon spacecraft used for transporting cargo. The space agency has said Boeing received more money because it was designing the Starliner from scratch.
Boeing recently suffered a significant setback when a Starliner capsule malfunctioned during a key uncrewed test flight. But if SpaceX can carry out this mission, it’ll be a major win forNASA, which has been pushing for more commercial partnerships.
Not to mention, NASA won’t have to ask Russia for rides anymore.
When and where is liftoff?
NASA and SpaceX are currently targeting Wednesday at 4:33 pt ET for liftoff from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in Brevard County, Fla. If bad weather or technical issues get in the way, NASA has May 30 and May 31 down as backup days.
As of Monday evening, there looked to be about a 60 per cent chance of favorable weather conditions. On launch day, officials will evaluate weather at six hours, four hours and 45 minutes before launch.
The rocket will take off from “Pad 39A,” a historic site that has been the starting point of missions dating back to the Apollo era, including the first moon landing in 1969. SpaceX is currently leasing the launch pad from NASA.
SpaceX and NASA will be cohosting a webcast during takeoff, and they’ll keep that live coverage rolling at least until Crew Dragon docks with the space station about 19 hours after launch.
CNN and other news networks will also be sharing live updates on TV and online.
Is it safe to launch during the pandemic?
According to NASA, yes.
The astronauts have been in strict quarantine together, and extra precautions are being taken to keep everything clean.
NASA, SpaceX and military personnel will need to gather in control rooms to support the launch, and they’ve implemented additional safety measures, such as changing control rooms when a new shift begins so that the other room can be deep cleaned.
Only a few dozen members of the press will be able to attend the launch, NASA has said, and Kennedy Space Center will not welcome any visitors.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and SpaceX chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell have also implored the public to follow the launch on television in order to prevent crowds of spectators from triggering a Covid 19 outbreak. Some local officials are also asking spectators not to gather on nearby beaches or other public viewing sites.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, has faced steep criticism over his online comments about the coronavirus. He’s repeatedly expressed his belief that the United States’coronavirus response is overblown and shared misinformation about its threat.
They work for NASA, but they’ve worked closely with SpaceX and have been trained to fly the Crew Dragon capsule, which will become only the fifth spacecraft design — after the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle vehicles — that NASA has certified as safe enough for humans.
Behnken and Hurley both began their careers as military test pilots and have logged hundreds of hours piloting supersonic jets. They also both flew on previous Space Shuttle missions. When NASA selected them for this mission in 2018, it continued a long lineage of military test pilots who were deemed to have the “right stuff” for groundbreaking moments in human spaceflight history.
NASA wants to keep Behnken and Hurley on the space station until another Crew Dragon capsule is ready to send more people on its next mission.
The astronauts told reporters last week that they’re expecting to spend one to three months in space. The maximum length is 110 days, according to NASA.
It’s a gumdrop-shaped capsule that measures about 13 feet in diameter and is equipped with seven seats and touchscreen controls.
Crew Dragon and the astronauts will ride into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and the astronauts will board the vehicle the day of launch using an aerial “crew access arm.” After the rocket fires the Crew Dragon into the upper atmosphere, the spacecraft will separate and fire up its own thrusters to begin maneuvering toward the space station.
The Crew Dragon capsule is fully autonomous, so the astronauts will mostly need to just monitor the systems and keep in touch with mission control unless something goes awry.
Despite Behnken and Hurley riding with a couple empty seats on board, they’re not planning to bring extra luggage. Behnken told reporters last week that they’re only taking along a few “small items” — though, it’s not yet clear what those items are.
The astronauts will spend about 19 hoursaboard the spacecraft before arriving at the International Space Station.
And yes, the Crew Dragon does have a toilet — just in case. Details about how it works have not been publicized. But one astronaut who worked on the Crew Dragon program said he has seen the design and said the accommodations are “perfectly adequate for that task.”
What is the International Space Station?
The International Space Station has orbited Earth for two decades. The United States and Russia are the station’s primary operators, but 240 astronauts from 19 countries have visited over the years.
Rotating crews of astronauts have staffed the ISS continuously since the year 2000, allowing thousands of scientific experiments to be carried out in microgravity. Research has included everything from how the human body responds to being in space to developing new medications.
Typically, about six people stay on the space station. But right now there are only three: NASA’s Christopher Cassidy and Russia’s Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.
What will this cost?
Seats on Russia’s Soyuz launches have cost NASA up to $86 million each and $55.4 million on average over the past decade, according to a 2019 report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General.
That same report estimates that Crew Dragon seats will cost NASA about $55 million each. But those are estimates based on a contract that doesn’t clearly define the per-seat cost and only accounts for the first six missions.
A new analysis from the nonprofit Planetary Society, which promotes science and space exploration, suggests that, overall, NASA’s commercial crew program is a bargain compared to previous human spaceflight programs in the United States.
Is Crew Dragon safe?
Both SpaceX and NASA have had to sign off on Crew Dragon’s development throughout every major testing milestone. And this mission will be no different.
Last week, NASA conducted a “launch readiness review,” which was meant to ensure that all the stakeholders are comfortable moving forward.
Any time a spacecraft leaves Earth there are risks, and there are no perfect measurements for predicting them.
But NASA does try: SpaceX is required to ensure that Crew Dragon has only a 1 in 270 chance of catastrophic failure, based on one metric the space agency uses. There have been numerous attempts to calculate what the risk was for a given Space Shuttle mission. Ultimately, out of 135 missions, there were two Shuttle tragedies — a failure rate of about 1 in every 68 missions.
It should also be noted that Crew Dragon’s previous uncrewed trip to space gives it more experience than other US spacecraft had before humans were allowed on board. The Space Shuttle, for instance, was never taken on an unmanned test drive.
Crew Dragon is also equipped with a unique emergency abort system designed to jettison astronauts to safety if something goes wrong.
How will this affect the United State’s relationship with Russia?
Officials in both countries have held up their symbiotic relationship on the ISS as a beacon of post-Cold War cooperation. But tensions have climbed since the early 2010s, and that has occasionally extended into the countries’ space partnership.
NASA officials said Russia and Japan, another ISS partner, both joined discussions for a Crew Dragon safety review last week.
How difficult was it for SpaceX to reach this point?
SpaceX’s relationship with NASA has evolved dramatically over the years. In the 2000s, SpaceX first few rocket launch attempts failed, and the company was nearly bankrupt in 2008 before it managed to safely launch one of its early Falcon 1 rockets into orbit. After that, NASA took a chance on the upstart and awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to fly cargo to the space station using a new capsule, Dragon, and rocket, dubbed Falcon 9.
SpaceX and NASA have worked closely — and sometimes awkwardly — together ever since. Their partnership has survived two failed SpaceX Falcon 9 missions: One in 2015, when a rocket hauling 5,000 pounds of cargo to the space station exploded on the way to orbit. In 2016, another Falcon 9 rocket blew up while sitting on a Florida launch pad, destroying a $200 million telecom satellite.
But the vast majority of the 80-plus Falcon 9 missions that SpaceX has launched so far have gone off without a hitch.
A setback in development of the Crew Dragon spacecraft came last year, when SpaceX was conducting a ground test of the vehicle’s emergency abort engines went explosively wrong.
SpaceX worked for months to reconfigure the Crew Dragon design and clear it with NASA before those abort engines performed flawlessly in a January test flight.
Will Crew Dragon make another trip?
One of SpaceX’s main goals is to bring down the costs of launching objects into space by reusing hardware.
Dragon capsules that fly cargo, for example, have been used up to three times.
And since 2015, SpaceX has managed to safely land a Falcon 9’s first-stage booster, the largest part of the rocket that gives the initial thrust at liftoff, dozens of times.
The rocket used for this week’s mission will be brand new, but SpaceX will attempt to recover the rocket’s first-stage rocket booster by landing it on a seafaring drone ship after launch.
Each Crew Dragon spacecraft could also make multiple trips to space, the company has suggested.
SpaceX’s most ambitious reuse efforts will be with Starship — a gargantuan spacecraft currently in the early stages of development. Musk hopes that every piece of that vehicle, and the giant rocket booster that will vault it into space, will be reusable.
Starship is at the core of Musk’s long-term plan for SpaceX: Sending humans to live on Mars.
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.
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.”
