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SpaceX Launch Of Crew Dragon Will Be Its Most Important Ever As Shocker Hits NASA

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Next week’s SpaceX launch received a key go-ahead as astronauts get ready to take off from U.S. soil for the first time since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011.

On Friday, NASA concluded a flight readiness review and cleared SpaceX, after some last-minute turmoil hit the space agency’s upper ranks.

“There are no significant open issues, I am happy to report,” said Steve Jurczyk, associate NASA administrator, who chaired the flight review.

A static fire of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket went smoothly Friday afternoon, as did a dress rehearsal with the astronauts on Saturday. A final launch readiness review is set for Monday.

The SpaceX launch will take place Wednesday on May 27 at 4:33 p.m. ET from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But the Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron said there is only a 40% chance of good conditions for the launch window.

The Crew Dragon capsule will carry astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station, docking 19 hours after launch.

But even before the abrupt resignation of NASA’s human spaceflight chief Monday, the stakes were already high for the SpaceX launch.

A successful mission would validate NASA’s goal of relying on private-sector companies like SpaceX and perhaps Boeing (BA) to provide transport to and from the International Space Station, freeing it to focus on deep-space exploration.

It also would open the door for SpaceX to leap ahead in the growing space tourism sector, which includes Virgin Galactic (SPCE) and Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. While SpaceX has been putting satellites into orbit and delivering supplies to the space station, it has never taken humans into space.

(SpaceX)

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA), has added his own flair to the SpaceX launch. Behnken and Hurley will ride a Tesla Model X to the Falcon 9 rocket that will take them to the space station.

While in space, the astronauts’ main objectives will be to check the capsule’s systems. But beyond that, things are less certain. NASA has said the mission could run anywhere from one month to the end of September, and a decision will come when the astronauts are on orbit. The Crew Dragon is capable of staying on orbit for 210 days.

 

 

Crewed SpaceX Launch A Long Time Coming

In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract and SpaceX a $2.6 billion contract to develop space taxis for missions to the space station and end its reliance on Russia’s Soyuz capsules.

After nine years, that day may finally come. If next week’s SpaceX launch goes as planned, the first operational Commercial Crew mission will come later this year, taking U.S. astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker as well as Japan’s Soichi Noguchi to the space station for a six-month mission.

(SpaceX)

Still, NASA is hedging its bets. Earlier this month, it reportedly paid over $90 million for an extra seat on a Soyuz capsule in mid-October in case there is still a delay with the SpaceX launch.

But NASA isn’t SpaceX’s only Crew Dragon customer as Axiom Space, which builds habitats and modules for the space station, signed a deal with SpaceX to fly three paying customers to the space station in late 2021.

SpaceX is also working with Space Adventures to fly four space tourists around the Earth’s orbit. No time frame has been given for the tourist flight.

NASA Stuns Just Before SpaceX Launch

But just over a week from the SpaceX launch, NASA shocked the space community when it announced Tuesday that Doug Loverro, associate administrator for human exploration and operations, had resigned effective Monday.

(NASA)

His tenure was just six months. Loverro took over when predecessor Bill Gerstenmaier left, reportedly over slowness on the Trump administration’s ambitious goal to return to the moon by 2024.

In a resignation letter, Loverro indicated his departure wasn’t related to the Commercial Crew program but to the Artemis moon program.

Weeks earlier, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX, Leidos‘ (LDOS) Dynetics unit and a Blue Origin-led team, which also includes Lockheed Martin (LMT) and Northrop Grumman (NOC), to develop lunar landers for Artemis.

On Friday, associate NASA administrator Jurczyk was asked if Loverro’s sudden departure meant more work to prepare as he had to take over the role of leading the flight readiness review.

“Actually, I’ve been conducting agency level reviews of the Commercial Crew Program for the last two years, as the associate administrator,” he said. “So those reviews prepared me really well to step in and share the flight Readiness Review.”

Crew Dragon, Starliner Delays

The SpaceX launch marks the company’s second test flight for NASA’s Commercial Crew program, following an uncrewed demonstration to the space station last year.

But delays have plagued the program for both Boeing and SpaceX as NASA implemented strict protocols for testing and other requirements for human-rated capsules.

(SpaceX)

Officials were worried earlier about SpaceX’s plans to fuel rockets while astronauts are on board, especially after a Falcon 9 exploded on the launchpad in 2016 while being fueled for a test fire. Last year, an empty Crew Dragon exploded while its thrusters were tested. SpaceX has also run into snags developing the parachutes for the capsule. NASA also questioned the safety culture at the company after Musk smoked marijuana on a popular podcast.

On Friday, NASA’s Commercial Crew manager, Kathy Lueders, was asked about last year’s capsule explosion and her thoughts on the upcoming SpaceX launch. “Don’t ever underestimate the value of a failure,” she replied.

Boeing has faced its own mishaps, and the aerospace giant has yet to successfully complete an uncrewed test of its Starliner capsule. In December, the Starliner set off on its uncrewed test, but it failed to reach the space station as planned because a software error prevented it from getting into the proper orbit.

An internal timer on the capsule was off by 11 hours. That caused the Boeing Starliner to believe that it was further into the mission than it actually was. Another software issue was found with the thrusters that could have lead to a catastrophic spacecraft failure.

As Boeing works through the coding issues, it plans to redo the uncrewed test and took a $410 million pretax charge in the fourth quarter for related costs.

Follow Gillian Rich on Twitter @IBD_GRich for space news and more.

Source: – Investor’s Business Daily

Edited By Harry Miller

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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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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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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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.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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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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