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.
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.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
The European Space Agency is fast-tracking a new mission called Ramses, which will fly to near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis and join the space rock in 2029 when it comes very close to our planet — closer even than the region where geosynchronous satellites sit.
Ramses is short for Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety and, as its name suggests, is the next phase in humanity’s efforts to learn more about near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) and how we might deflect them should one ever be discovered on a collision course with planet Earth.
In order to launch in time to rendezvous with Apophis in February 2029, scientists at the European Space Agency have been given permission to start planning Ramses even before the multinational space agency officially adopts the mission. The sanctioning and appropriation of funding for the Ramses mission will hopefully take place at ESA’s Ministerial Council meeting (involving representatives from each of ESA’s member states) in November of 2025. To arrive at Apophis in February 2029, launch would have to take place in April 2028, the agency says.
This is a big deal because large asteroids don’t come this close to Earth very often. It is thus scientifically precious that, on April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass within 19,794 miles (31,860 kilometers) of Earth. For comparison, geosynchronous orbit is 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth’s surface. Such close fly-bys by asteroids hundreds of meters across (Apophis is about 1,230 feet, or 375 meters, across) only occur on average once every 5,000 to 10,000 years. Miss this one, and we’ve got a long time to wait for the next.
When Apophis was discovered in 2004, it was for a short time the most dangerous asteroid known, being classified as having the potential to impact with Earth possibly in 2029, 2036, or 2068. Should an asteroid of its size strike Earth, it could gouge out a crater several kilometers across and devastate a country with shock waves, flash heating and earth tremors. If it crashed down in the ocean, it could send a towering tsunami to devastate coastlines in multiple countries.
Over time, as our knowledge of Apophis’ orbit became more refined, however, the risk of impact greatly went down. Radar observations of the asteroid in March of 2021 reduced the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit from hundreds of kilometers to just a few kilometers, finally removing any lingering worries about an impact — at least for the next 100 years. (Beyond 100 years, asteroid orbits can become too unpredictable to plot with any accuracy, but there’s currently no suggestion that an impact will occur after 100 years.) So, Earth is expected to be perfectly safe in 2029 when Apophis comes through. Still, scientists want to see how Apophis responds by coming so close to Earth and entering our planet’s gravitational field.
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“There is still so much we have yet to learn about asteroids but, until now, we have had to travel deep into the solar system to study them and perform experiments ourselves to interact with their surface,” said Patrick Michel, who is the Director of Research at CNRS at Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, in a statement. “Nature is bringing one to us and conducting the experiment itself. All we need to do is watch as Apophis is stretched and squeezed by strong tidal forces that may trigger landslides and other disturbances and reveal new material from beneath the surface.”
The Goldstone radar’s imagery of asteroid 99942 Apophis as it made its closest approach to Earth, in March 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/NSF/AUI/GBO)
By arriving at Apophis before the asteroid’s close encounter with Earth, and sticking with it throughout the flyby and beyond, Ramses will be in prime position to conduct before-and-after surveys to see how Apophis reacts to Earth. By looking for disturbances Earth’s gravitational tidal forces trigger on the asteroid’s surface, Ramses will be able to learn about Apophis’ internal structure, density, porosity and composition, all of which are characteristics that we would need to first understand before considering how best to deflect a similar asteroid were one ever found to be on a collision course with our world.
Besides assisting in protecting Earth, learning about Apophis will give scientists further insights into how similar asteroids formed in the early solar system, and, in the process, how planets (including Earth) formed out of the same material.
One way we already know Earth will affect Apophis is by changing its orbit. Currently, Apophis is categorized as an Aten-type asteroid, which is what we call the class of near-Earth objects that have a shorter orbit around the sun than Earth does. Apophis currently gets as far as 0.92 astronomical units (137.6 million km, or 85.5 million miles) from the sun. However, our planet will give Apophis a gravitational nudge that will enlarge its orbit to 1.1 astronomical units (164.6 million km, or 102 million miles), such that its orbital period becomes longer than Earth’s.
It will then be classed as an Apollo-type asteroid.
Ramses won’t be alone in tracking Apophis. NASA has repurposed their OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned a sample from another near-Earth asteroid, 101955 Bennu, in 2023. However, the spacecraft, renamed OSIRIS-APEX (Apophis Explorer), won’t arrive at the asteroid until April 23, 2029, ten days after the close encounter with Earth. OSIRIS-APEX will initially perform a flyby of Apophis at a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from the object, then return in June that year to settle into orbit around Apophis for an 18-month mission.
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Furthermore, the European Space Agency still plans on launching its Hera spacecraft in October 2024 to follow-up on the DART mission to the double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos. DART impacted the latter in a test of kinetic impactor capabilities for potentially changing a hazardous asteroid’s orbit around our planet. Hera will survey the binary asteroid system and observe the crater made by DART’s sacrifice to gain a better understanding of Dimorphos’ structure and composition post-impact, so that we can place the results in context.
The more near-Earth asteroids like Dimorphos and Apophis that we study, the greater that context becomes. Perhaps, one day, the understanding that we have gained from these missions will indeed save our planet.
