Norm Knight started his NASA career in the ’90s with the space shuttle, impressed by the engineering marvel that launched like a rocket, hauled space station parts like a truck and then landed like a glider.
When space shuttle Atlantis touched down for the last time on July 21, 2011, Knight was on Houston’s mission control management team overseeing that landing. Nine years later, he’s helping with the May 27 liftoff where NASA and SpaceX will resume astronaut launches from Florida. But this time, the vehicle will be reminiscent of the compact Apollo capsule that inspired his youth rather than the massive shuttle that nurtured his career.
“It was sad to see the shuttle retired,” he said. “It was a winged glider coming home that was like no other.”
Yet he’s excited for the SpaceX launch. NASA has spent years working with SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, and Boeing to develop vehicles that could ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. The government agency provided funding and expertise but the companies designed the spacecraft that they own and operate. NASA will buy seats as a customer.
Compact capsules are simpler and faster to design than the bulky shuttle orbiter, which was 122 feet long with a 78-foot wingspan. A capsule’s placement on top of the rocket, rather than alongside it like the shuttle, can help keep astronauts safe.
Still, Knight said it was difficult watching the shuttle retire after flying 30 years and 135 missions. NASA was suddenly dependent on Russia for reaching the International Space Station. And around that same time, President Barack Obama canceled the agency’s prior moon mission, the Constellation Program, where Knight and others had placed their post-shuttle hopes.
“That was a very hard time at NASA,” Knight said. “It really left the agency in a lot of turmoil relative to, ‘What are we doing? What is NASA’s role now?’”
But he sees a vision again. The launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft, the final major test before SpaceX receives NASA certification for more regular flights to the space station, is a successful milestone for NASA collaboration with the private sector. That will be crucial in the agency’s new moon program, Artemis — NASA plans to buy seats on vehicles that will lower astronauts to the moon.
More leeway
NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, established as a standalone program on April 5, 2011, takes a very different approach from the Space Shuttle Program where NASA made all the design decisions and then owned and operated the vehicles.
NASA would give its contractors 10,000 to 12,000 requirements for a shuttle’s design. These requirements ranged from the ability to reach a certain orbit to how much stainless steel was included in bolts, said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA headquarters.
For Commercial Crew, NASA only had 300 requirements. And they were mostly related to safety, such as an abort system to carry the spacecraft away from the rocket should a problem occur during launch and a statistical calculation that placed loss of crew at no more than 1 in every 270 flights.
NASA did not care if the Commercial Crew companies proposed a winged vehicle or a capsule, as long as the system was safe, reliable and cost effective. Sierra Nevada Corp., one of the final three contenders, proposed a winged vehicle.
McAlister said the companies’ entire systems were evaluated, and the Sierra Nevada proposal “was very strong.” Still, wings did factor into the decision.
“Both Boeing and SpaceX use a capsule spacecraft, which is a lower complexity design than (Sierra Nevada’s) winged spacecraft,” according to a 2014 document explaining the Commercial Crew selection, “and therefore minimizes the work and time required to complete development.”
NASA chose SpaceX and Boeing in September 2014, and the two companies have contracts and Space Act Agreements worth $8 billion; NASA has thus far provided just under $6 billion to help with development.
Keeping it simple
Boeing and the companies it’s acquired over the years have experience building capsules and space shuttles. It picked the capsule design for the CST-100 Starliner.
“It was a shorter road to get that fully developed and in use,” Boeing spokesman Steven Siceloff said, “and it met NASA’s needs.”
SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. But during a May 1 news conference Benji Reed, SpaceX director of crew mission management, said the Crew Dragon was built on decades of capsule heritage as well as the company’s uncrewed cargo capsule, which began delivering supplies to the space station in 2012.
Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at Bryce Space and Technology, said capsules are structurally simpler than winged spacecraft when designing and modeling how a vehicle will behave while landing. A capsule comes in like a cannonball. Fixed wings, however, act one way at a certain speed or air density and then a completely different way at other speeds or air densities, presenting design challenges.
“Flying a winged vehicle back from orbit is more complicated than bringing back a capsule,” said Jeffrey Hoffman, a retired shuttle astronaut and professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But winged vehicles haven’t disappeared. Sierra Nevada Corp. is still developing its Dream Chaser spaceplane, retooling it to deliver cargo rather than people to the International Space Station. Steve Lindsey, a former space shuttle commander and the senior vice president of strategy at Sierra Nevada, said the Dream Chaser’s ability to land on airport runways gives it global reach. And the force of gravity during this landing is gentler than in a capsule that lands in the ocean or on airbags in the desert. Some experiments, such as growing protein crystals, are delicate and sent into space specifically for its lesser gravity.
Ultimately, Sierra Nevada is still working toward flying people.
Virgin Galactic is likewise planning to use a winged vehicle for suborbital space tourism. WhiteKnightTwo is a custom-built, dual-fuselage jet aircraft and attached to its belly is the winged SpaceShipTwo, where passengers will sit.
Virgin Galactic has launched its pilots and an employee into weightlessness, but it has not yet flown paying customers.
Safety
Space travel is risky, with two space shuttle accidents killing 14 people, but designs using capsules can have features to help minimize risk, especially during launch, said Scott Hubbard, adjunct professor in Stanford University’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center.
The Columbia shuttle broke apart during reentry in 2003, but the damage that caused this accident occurred during launch. A large piece of insulating foam fell off the shuttle’s external tank, which held fuel for the main engines, and punctured a hole in the wing of the space shuttle’s orbiter. This caused the vehicle to overheat during reentry.
Placing a capsule on top of the rocket prevents it from being pummeled by launch debris.
The Challenger space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after launch in 1986. One of its solid rocket boosters had a leak in the O-ring that caused an explosion and destroyed the orbiter vehicle. The orbiter could not escape the boosters during this part of the ascent.
“You could lose almost one of anything and you could get back safely,” Hoffman said. “Obviously, they didn’t plan for a major explosion or failure of the solid rocket booster.”
For Commercial Crew, NASA required an ability to remove crew from dangerous launch situations. SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada included this in their proposals.
SpaceX and Boeing are using a pusher system with specific abort motors to push the crew up and away from the rocket. It’s a feature astronaut Doug Hurley, who will be one of two astronauts on the May 27 flight test, addressed during a news conference. “It’s a pretty safe design,” Hurley said. “It gives us abort capability from the pad all the way up into space, which the space shuttle, I think has been well publicized, didn’t have that capability in all phases.”
Hubbard, who helped investigate the Columbia accident, felt the space shuttle was retired partly due to its safety concerns. He said the vehicle was so complex that there could have been more failures NASA was lucky to not encounter.
New era
Not everyone thought this was a fair opinion. Knight, for instance, felt that NASA was managing the shuttle’s risks.
Promoted from chief flight director to the deputy director of flight operations in 2018, Knight will be at Kennedy Space Center on May 27 representing NASA’s astronauts and flight operations by providing a go (or no-go) to the agency’s launch manager. Both NASA and SpaceX must give the green light before liftoff.
After the launch, Knight will return to Houston to assist with other portions of the flight test, which is being run by teams in Florida, Houston and the SpaceX headquarters in California. Astronauts Hurley and Bob Behnken could spend between 30 days and 119 days on the space station before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.
Knight hopes this is part of a longer road NASA is paving into space, partnering with commercial companies to bring the rest of us along.
“I’m excited to see this thing lift off,” Knight said. “It’s going to be a bright shining star for our future in space. It’s really the beginning of a new era.”
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.”
