"I can imagine no other president in my lifetime failing to address the nation in a prime time speech during a crisis such as this. On the other hand, I cannot imagine another president whose words would be less welcome by so many of his fellow citizens."
@DanRather
Sunday, May 31, 2020
In Louisville, Ky., a tense confrontation in the middle of a crowded street was partially defused when a black woman stepped forward and offered a policeman in riot gear a hug. They embraced for nearly a minute.
- In Birmingham, Ala., protesters started to tear down a Confederate monument that the city had previously covered with a tarp amid a lawsuit between the state attorney general and the city.
- In Boston, a police S.U.V. was set ablaze near the State House, sending up a column of black smoke after a large group of protesters had mostly dispersed.
- In Philadelphia, police officers in riot gear and an armored vehicle used pepper spray to try to repel rioters and looters. A wall of officers blocked an entrance ramp to Interstate 676 in the city, where the mass transit system suspending service starting at 6 p.m. as part of a citywide curfew.
- In New York, demonstrators marched across the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges, snarling traffic. The Manhattan Bridge was briefly shut down to car traffic. Chaos erupted in Union Square at around 10 p.m., with flames leaping up two stories from trash cans and piles of street debris. The night before in Union Square, the mayor’s daughter, Chiara de Blasio, 25, was among the protesters arrested, according to a police official.
- In Chicago, the police superintendent, David Brown, excoriated the looters on Sunday as Gov. J.B. Pritzker activated the National Guard at the city’s request.
- In Louisville, Ky., a tense confrontation in the middle of a crowded street was partially defused when a black woman stepped forward and offered a policeman in riot gear a hug. They embraced for nearly a minute.
The civil war in America is getting worse.
| BREAKING NEWS |
Police fired tear gas at protesters who set fires near the White House as unrest continued in cities across America. Here’s the latest. |
| Monday, June 1, 2020 12:01 AM EST |
Protesters seethed in dozens of cities, again defying curfews to demonstrate against police brutality following the death of George Floyd in police custody last week in Minneapolis.
|
| Read the latest |
LIVE UPDATES
Nationwide demonstrations resume, officials in several states reinforce their National Guard presence and anger mounts at increasingly aggressive tactics by the police.
RIGHT NOW
Fires are burning in the streets near the White House in Washington, where a curfew went into effect at 11 p.m. Eastern time.
The White House goes dark as fires rage nearby.
The Times has reporters on the ground in dozens of cities across the country. Here’s some of what they are seeing.
- Two Atlanta police officers were fired for using excessive force during a protest.
- A man is arrested after driving a truck through a crowd of Minnesota protesters.
- Trump is heard, but not seen, on a simmering Sunday.
- Could protesting spread coronavirus? Officials are worried.
- National Guard commanders say troops are meant only to keep the peace.
An interesting article about the problems in Minneapolis.
The Washington Post
Politics
Buildings burn, and Trump talks tough. Where are the healers?
By Marc Fisher
May 30, 2020
As protests quickly flipped from peaceful to fiery in more than two dozen U.S. cities, President Trump said little Saturday about the frustrations that drove thousands of people to crowd into downtown streets in the middle of a pandemic. Instead, the president defaulted to his usual style of leadership: tearing people down and talking tough.
“Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis will never be mistaken for the late, great General Douglas McArthur [sic] or great fighter General George Patton,” Trump tweeted Saturday of the Democrat whose city was in flames. “How come all of these places that defend so poorly are run by Liberal Democrats? Get tough and fight (and arrest the bad ones). STRENGTH!”
Trump blasted demonstrators who had confronted Secret Service agents outside the White House as “professionally managed so-called ‘protesters’ ” who “were just there to cause trouble.” And he seemed to savor a confrontation, tweeting that “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”
There was no talk of uniting the country and, hours later, only brief mention of those protesting racial injustice, police brutality and the killing by a white police officer of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Even then, Trump maintained the strategy he has used throughout his tenure, emphasizing the nation’s divisions and seeking to capitalize on them.
“We support the right of peaceful protests and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with the memory of George Floyd,” Trump said after watching the SpaceX launch in Florida. “The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups who are terrorizing the innocent, destroying jobs, hurting businesses and burning down buildings.”
Protesters mass in cities across the country, National Guard activated in multiple states
In the absence of presidential leadership, and with crowds gathering yet again Saturday night, members of Congress, governors and mayors need to step up, said Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer.
“If some leaders don’t offer a prospect of change in the next few days, that sense of hopelessness we’re seeing on the streets just gets worse,” said Zelizer, who studies the 1960s and ’70s, a period of similar social and economic upheaval when divisions over race and class exploded into riots.
“Good leaders cannot separate themselves from the turbulence,” Zelizer said. “If they’re silent, or if they’re too distant, it just adds to the frustration people feel.”
There is no magic formula for averting a long, hot summer of street violence and social discord, of raging flames and physical confrontations. Through several nights of intensifying protests following Floyd’s death on Monday, few moments have offered any promise of a healing connection. Rather, the people Americans have chosen to take charge in times of crisis have more often left a leadership vacuum — such as the remarkable absence of police and public officials on the streets of Minneapolis in recent days.
A rare exception came on Friday night in Atlanta. As fires burned and angry crowds banged up against lines of police officers, the city’s police chief, Erika Shields, waded into a clot of protesters and listened to their grievances.
Shields told the protesters that bad cops must be “weeded out and fired before they can choke somebody.” She told them again and again, “I’m with you.” She gently touched their arms.
“I’m standing here because what I saw was my people face to face with this crowd, and everybody’s thinking ‘How can we use force to defuse it?’ And I’m not having it. I’m not having it,” Shields told the crowd. “You have a right to be upset and be scared and to want to yell.”
Demonstrators thanked the chief, held her hand and cried to her about their fear for their children’s lives.
By contrast, the lack of evident leadership on the streets of Minneapolis on Thursday and Friday nights — a source of wonderment among TV commentators across the ideological spectrum — led to the sense that no one was in charge. Businesses burned to the ground. The nation watched on live TV as crowds looted liquor stores and other shops, with no pushback from the authorities.
Minnesota officials seemed to speak of everything but a constructive path forward. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), who represents Minneapolis, posted a video saying that “we can’t ask our community to be peaceful if we continue to not deliver justice for them.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) denounced the protests, calling Friday’s violence “a mockery of pretending this is about George Floyd’s death or inequities or historical traumas to our communities of color.”
The sight of demonstrators breaching and setting fire to the Minneapolis police department’s 3rd Precinct station on Thursday became a symbol of the government’s loss of control. Frey, the city’s first-term mayor, said he ordered police to abandon the station.
“The symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of life, of our officers or to the public,” he said.
But Lucy Gerold, who spent 31 years with the Minneapolis police, the last six as commander of the 3rd Precinct, called that decision “an inexperienced and naive response” that sent the wrong message to demonstrators.
City leaders “just said okay, if we just give them the precinct, we’ll feed the beast and they’ll be satisfied,” said Gerold, who left the department in 2014. “That’s just feeding the fire. . . . I think that opened the door for the rest of it.”
Probably no political gesture, speech or legislative action could have prevented this week’s explosion of frustrations. But in the long, ugly history of American political street violence, the enduring images of healing often involve dramatic scenes of politicians and police who, rather than facing off against protesters, waded in for tough, painful confrontations that pointed a path toward reforms.
On the night the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968, as 34 U.S. cities burned in riots of grief and anger, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy stepped before a crowd in an Indianapolis neighborhood already engulfed in protest. Police had declined to accompany Kennedy because the crowd was too hot.
Standing on a flatbed truck, Kennedy said to a virtually all-black crowd: “You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people among black, white people among white, filled with hatred toward one another.
“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”
Kennedy spoke that night for the first time in public about the killing of his brother, the president. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
The president at that moment, Lyndon Johnson, made no such gesture as U.S. cities burned. He felt betrayed, believing that by winning historic civil rights laws, he had done more for the country’s black population than any president in decades.
Trump, too, has perceived the week’s violence through the prism of his own political status. Retweeting a list of top Minnesota politicians, all Democrats, he wrote, “Time for a change!”
On Saturday afternoon, Trump urged the nation’s mayors to “get tougher,” and he dismissed protesters as “a lot of radical left bad people.”
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), whom the president had accused of failing to provide police support for Secret Service officers guarding the White House, blasted Trump on Saturday for his brand of leadership.
“We need leaders who . . . in times of great turmoil and despair can provide us a sense of calm and a sense of hope. Instead, what we’ve got in the last two days from the White House is the glorification of violence against American citizens,” Bowser said.
The lack of a clear, consistent message helped create a sense of anarchy that fed reactions ranging from disappointment to denunciation around the world. America’s rivals and adversaries jumped on the violence as proof that the United States treats its people unjustly.
Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that a “racist and fascist approach” led to Floyd’s death and was a symbol of an “unjust order” in the United States. In Iran, people held a candlelight vigil in memory of Floyd. In China, state television broadcast a commentary contending that excessive police force “shows the deep social contradictions” in the United States.
Trump continued to talk tough; on Saturday, he reiterated an offer to make the Army available to suppress riots, saying, “We have our military ready, willing and able.”
Other political leaders also made clear that the street violence was unacceptable. Atlanta’s mayor directed a stirring, tough message to protesters who were setting fires on the city’s streets.
“This is not a protest,” said Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D). “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos. A protest has purpose. . . . You’re not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands and breaking windows in this city. . . . Go home!”
But there was little talk about the kinds of reforms that might at last repair relations between police and black Americans.
“That’s not going to come from this president, but policing is still mostly a local and state issue,” Zelizer said. “Just as we’ve seen with the pandemic, governors can and will step up.”
The reports from blue-ribbon commission and congressional investigations produced following past rounds of urban street violence would test the strength of any bookshelf. And that process has brought changes that have reduced the use of force in many police departments, especially in big cities.
But police brutality and racial bias continue to hold explosive power as political issues, and few elected officials spend much energy confronting the problem. It’s easier for some leaders to traffic in pat slogans, bashing either the police or the protesters.
Trump’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — coined by a former Miami police chief and used at campaign rallies by the 1968 independent presidential candidate, segregationist George Wallace — was a reminder that it can be all too easy to use division and discord to bolster a political following.
Wallace built a movement with overtly racist appeals in 1968, lashing out at protesters. “If any demonstrator lies down in front of my car when I’m president, that’ll be the last car he lays down in front of,” he said.
Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president that year, blasted antiwar protesters. “They call themselves flower children. I call them spoiled rotten,” he said. But as the nation suffered through a summer of street violence, Nixon softened his campaign, settling for a while on a more hopeful message.
In one campaign TV ad, he summoned “the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. . . . They are black, and they are white; they’re native-born and foreign-born; they’re young, and they’re old. . . . They know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.”
In 2016, Trump adopted not Nixon’s approach, but Wallace’s message, the one that clicked with disaffected, frustrated white voters — a politics of grievance, featuring full-throated attacks on elites, government and the media.
Late Saturday, as the nation braced for another scary night, Trump continued his campaign, tweeting, as ever: “Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”
Mark Berman contributed to this report.
Politics
Buildings burn, and Trump talks tough. Where are the healers?
By Marc Fisher
May 30, 2020
As protests quickly flipped from peaceful to fiery in more than two dozen U.S. cities, President Trump said little Saturday about the frustrations that drove thousands of people to crowd into downtown streets in the middle of a pandemic. Instead, the president defaulted to his usual style of leadership: tearing people down and talking tough.
“Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis will never be mistaken for the late, great General Douglas McArthur [sic] or great fighter General George Patton,” Trump tweeted Saturday of the Democrat whose city was in flames. “How come all of these places that defend so poorly are run by Liberal Democrats? Get tough and fight (and arrest the bad ones). STRENGTH!”
Trump blasted demonstrators who had confronted Secret Service agents outside the White House as “professionally managed so-called ‘protesters’ ” who “were just there to cause trouble.” And he seemed to savor a confrontation, tweeting that “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”
There was no talk of uniting the country and, hours later, only brief mention of those protesting racial injustice, police brutality and the killing by a white police officer of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Even then, Trump maintained the strategy he has used throughout his tenure, emphasizing the nation’s divisions and seeking to capitalize on them.
“We support the right of peaceful protests and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with the memory of George Floyd,” Trump said after watching the SpaceX launch in Florida. “The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups who are terrorizing the innocent, destroying jobs, hurting businesses and burning down buildings.”
Protesters mass in cities across the country, National Guard activated in multiple states
In the absence of presidential leadership, and with crowds gathering yet again Saturday night, members of Congress, governors and mayors need to step up, said Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer.
“If some leaders don’t offer a prospect of change in the next few days, that sense of hopelessness we’re seeing on the streets just gets worse,” said Zelizer, who studies the 1960s and ’70s, a period of similar social and economic upheaval when divisions over race and class exploded into riots.
“Good leaders cannot separate themselves from the turbulence,” Zelizer said. “If they’re silent, or if they’re too distant, it just adds to the frustration people feel.”
There is no magic formula for averting a long, hot summer of street violence and social discord, of raging flames and physical confrontations. Through several nights of intensifying protests following Floyd’s death on Monday, few moments have offered any promise of a healing connection. Rather, the people Americans have chosen to take charge in times of crisis have more often left a leadership vacuum — such as the remarkable absence of police and public officials on the streets of Minneapolis in recent days.
A rare exception came on Friday night in Atlanta. As fires burned and angry crowds banged up against lines of police officers, the city’s police chief, Erika Shields, waded into a clot of protesters and listened to their grievances.
Shields told the protesters that bad cops must be “weeded out and fired before they can choke somebody.” She told them again and again, “I’m with you.” She gently touched their arms.
“I’m standing here because what I saw was my people face to face with this crowd, and everybody’s thinking ‘How can we use force to defuse it?’ And I’m not having it. I’m not having it,” Shields told the crowd. “You have a right to be upset and be scared and to want to yell.”
Demonstrators thanked the chief, held her hand and cried to her about their fear for their children’s lives.
By contrast, the lack of evident leadership on the streets of Minneapolis on Thursday and Friday nights — a source of wonderment among TV commentators across the ideological spectrum — led to the sense that no one was in charge. Businesses burned to the ground. The nation watched on live TV as crowds looted liquor stores and other shops, with no pushback from the authorities.
Minnesota officials seemed to speak of everything but a constructive path forward. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), who represents Minneapolis, posted a video saying that “we can’t ask our community to be peaceful if we continue to not deliver justice for them.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) denounced the protests, calling Friday’s violence “a mockery of pretending this is about George Floyd’s death or inequities or historical traumas to our communities of color.”
The sight of demonstrators breaching and setting fire to the Minneapolis police department’s 3rd Precinct station on Thursday became a symbol of the government’s loss of control. Frey, the city’s first-term mayor, said he ordered police to abandon the station.
“The symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of life, of our officers or to the public,” he said.
But Lucy Gerold, who spent 31 years with the Minneapolis police, the last six as commander of the 3rd Precinct, called that decision “an inexperienced and naive response” that sent the wrong message to demonstrators.
City leaders “just said okay, if we just give them the precinct, we’ll feed the beast and they’ll be satisfied,” said Gerold, who left the department in 2014. “That’s just feeding the fire. . . . I think that opened the door for the rest of it.”
Probably no political gesture, speech or legislative action could have prevented this week’s explosion of frustrations. But in the long, ugly history of American political street violence, the enduring images of healing often involve dramatic scenes of politicians and police who, rather than facing off against protesters, waded in for tough, painful confrontations that pointed a path toward reforms.
On the night the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968, as 34 U.S. cities burned in riots of grief and anger, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy stepped before a crowd in an Indianapolis neighborhood already engulfed in protest. Police had declined to accompany Kennedy because the crowd was too hot.
Standing on a flatbed truck, Kennedy said to a virtually all-black crowd: “You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people among black, white people among white, filled with hatred toward one another.
“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”
Kennedy spoke that night for the first time in public about the killing of his brother, the president. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
The president at that moment, Lyndon Johnson, made no such gesture as U.S. cities burned. He felt betrayed, believing that by winning historic civil rights laws, he had done more for the country’s black population than any president in decades.
Trump, too, has perceived the week’s violence through the prism of his own political status. Retweeting a list of top Minnesota politicians, all Democrats, he wrote, “Time for a change!”
On Saturday afternoon, Trump urged the nation’s mayors to “get tougher,” and he dismissed protesters as “a lot of radical left bad people.”
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), whom the president had accused of failing to provide police support for Secret Service officers guarding the White House, blasted Trump on Saturday for his brand of leadership.
“We need leaders who . . . in times of great turmoil and despair can provide us a sense of calm and a sense of hope. Instead, what we’ve got in the last two days from the White House is the glorification of violence against American citizens,” Bowser said.
The lack of a clear, consistent message helped create a sense of anarchy that fed reactions ranging from disappointment to denunciation around the world. America’s rivals and adversaries jumped on the violence as proof that the United States treats its people unjustly.
Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that a “racist and fascist approach” led to Floyd’s death and was a symbol of an “unjust order” in the United States. In Iran, people held a candlelight vigil in memory of Floyd. In China, state television broadcast a commentary contending that excessive police force “shows the deep social contradictions” in the United States.
Trump continued to talk tough; on Saturday, he reiterated an offer to make the Army available to suppress riots, saying, “We have our military ready, willing and able.”
Other political leaders also made clear that the street violence was unacceptable. Atlanta’s mayor directed a stirring, tough message to protesters who were setting fires on the city’s streets.
“This is not a protest,” said Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D). “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos. A protest has purpose. . . . You’re not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands and breaking windows in this city. . . . Go home!”
But there was little talk about the kinds of reforms that might at last repair relations between police and black Americans.
“That’s not going to come from this president, but policing is still mostly a local and state issue,” Zelizer said. “Just as we’ve seen with the pandemic, governors can and will step up.”
The reports from blue-ribbon commission and congressional investigations produced following past rounds of urban street violence would test the strength of any bookshelf. And that process has brought changes that have reduced the use of force in many police departments, especially in big cities.
But police brutality and racial bias continue to hold explosive power as political issues, and few elected officials spend much energy confronting the problem. It’s easier for some leaders to traffic in pat slogans, bashing either the police or the protesters.
Trump’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — coined by a former Miami police chief and used at campaign rallies by the 1968 independent presidential candidate, segregationist George Wallace — was a reminder that it can be all too easy to use division and discord to bolster a political following.
Wallace built a movement with overtly racist appeals in 1968, lashing out at protesters. “If any demonstrator lies down in front of my car when I’m president, that’ll be the last car he lays down in front of,” he said.
Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president that year, blasted antiwar protesters. “They call themselves flower children. I call them spoiled rotten,” he said. But as the nation suffered through a summer of street violence, Nixon softened his campaign, settling for a while on a more hopeful message.
In one campaign TV ad, he summoned “the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. . . . They are black, and they are white; they’re native-born and foreign-born; they’re young, and they’re old. . . . They know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.”
In 2016, Trump adopted not Nixon’s approach, but Wallace’s message, the one that clicked with disaffected, frustrated white voters — a politics of grievance, featuring full-throated attacks on elites, government and the media.
Late Saturday, as the nation braced for another scary night, Trump continued his campaign, tweeting, as ever: “Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”
Mark Berman contributed to this report.
Everything went perfectly. America did something right.
The 2 Americans entered the International Space Station today. I watched the whole thing. Before the docking the Americans had a chance to play with the controls. Everything worked perfectly.
After the docking, it took about 3 hours before they entered the Station. Lots of things had to be done first.
When they entered the Space Station it was a big fucking deal. Some politicians asked some questions and talked about what happened. And because this is Idiot America, the fucktards had to repeatedly say "god bless you". It was ridiculous.
After the docking, it took about 3 hours before they entered the Station. Lots of things had to be done first.
When they entered the Space Station it was a big fucking deal. Some politicians asked some questions and talked about what happened. And because this is Idiot America, the fucktards had to repeatedly say "god bless you". It was ridiculous.
The Galápagos Islands near Ecuador. I recommend looking this place up. Lots of interesting creatures. Charles Darwin was there.
Google Doodle slideshow captures the beauty of the Galápagos Islands
Wikipedia - Galápagos Islands
The Galápagos Islands is a volcanic archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. It's considered one of the world's foremost destinations for wildlife-viewing. A province of Ecuador, it lies about 1,000km off its coast. Its isolated terrain shelters a diversity of plant and animal species, many found nowhere else. Charles Darwin visited in 1835, and his observation of Galápagos' species later inspired his theory of evolution.
Wikipedia - Galápagos Islands
The Galápagos Islands is a volcanic archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. It's considered one of the world's foremost destinations for wildlife-viewing. A province of Ecuador, it lies about 1,000km off its coast. Its isolated terrain shelters a diversity of plant and animal species, many found nowhere else. Charles Darwin visited in 1835, and his observation of Galápagos' species later inspired his theory of evolution.
Saturday, May 30, 2020
An interesting comment at the Wall Street Journal. It's about the problems in Minneapolis.
"These are not 'demonstrations'."
Oh YES THEY ARE! Demonstrating just how ugly things can get when things are and have been unfair for a very long time!! I'll bet a month's salary you are not a Black American! NOONE should wonder if they're going to make it out "alive" after being cuffed and detained by police! EVERYONE knows this could happen to ANYONE, however, it was ANOTHER African American!! Enough!!!!
Oh YES THEY ARE! Demonstrating just how ugly things can get when things are and have been unfair for a very long time!! I'll bet a month's salary you are not a Black American! NOONE should wonder if they're going to make it out "alive" after being cuffed and detained by police! EVERYONE knows this could happen to ANYONE, however, it was ANOTHER African American!! Enough!!!!
GO ON WEATHER
THE THING IS GOING TODAY, ABOUT 1/2 HOUR FROM NOW.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
WELL DONE. THEY'RE ON THE WAY TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
3:35 pm: The astronauts reach orbit
SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9 rocket and officially reached orbit, as NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley head to the International Space Station. They should arrive at the space station on Sunday at about 10:30 a.m. ET.
That would be 9:30 AM Chicago time.
NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
WELL DONE. THEY'RE ON THE WAY TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
3:35 pm: The astronauts reach orbit
SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9 rocket and officially reached orbit, as NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley head to the International Space Station. They should arrive at the space station on Sunday at about 10:30 a.m. ET.
That would be 9:30 AM Chicago time.
NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV
This is extremely rare. The United States Army is not usually used to defend this nation from itself.
The Defense Department ordered the Army to prepare military police units to deploy to Minneapolis after another night of protests.
RIGHT NOW
The Pentagon says that active-duty units from across the country have been put on notice, at the behest of President Trump.
We seem to be having a civil war here in America.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) on Saturday said that he was “fully” mobilizing the state’s National Guard, a first in the state’s history.
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Protests in major U.S. cities marked by arrests, destruction
At least 20 U.S. cities are waking up to destruction and arrests Saturday morning after unrest over the death of George Floyd boiled over in the Twin Cities, sparking demonstrations — some peaceful, others violent — across the country.
Minneapolis
In Minneapolis, flames streamed from several businesses overnight — a gas station, a post office, a bank, a restaurant — and protesters defied an 8 p.m. curfew, milling in the streets and facing off with officers, even forcing Guard troops to retreat at one point.
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I don't care about gas stations. I don't care about banks. I don't care about restaurants. But destroying a post office, that's wrong. Civilized people do not burn down a post office.
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I don't care about gas stations. I don't care about banks. I don't care about restaurants. But destroying a post office, that's wrong. Civilized people do not burn down a post office.
Who are we?
"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."
-- Carl Sagan
"Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact."
-- Carl Sagan
This blog has 51 posts about Carl Sagan at Carl Sagan.
Wikipedia - Carl Sagan
-- Carl Sagan
"Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact."
-- Carl Sagan
This blog has 51 posts about Carl Sagan at Carl Sagan.
Wikipedia - Carl Sagan
I'm adding this to my list of favorite quotes. It's about what makes human progress possible.
"Don't ever underestimate the value of a failure."
https://twitter.com/nasa/status/1263916717207695361
What someone else wrote:
"Not sure what my parents learned from me, but I'll let them know."
https://twitter.com/nasa/status/1263916717207695361
What someone else wrote:
"Not sure what my parents learned from me, but I'll let them know."
Today is Saturday, May 30, 2020. I know this is true because I looked it up.
Today I'm going to play chess and probably lose almost every game at https://lichess.org/.
I'm also going to watch the SpaceX thing be canceled again because of the weather at LIVE NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV. If despite the odds the SpaceX thing goes to the International Space Station, it will take off at 2:22 PM Chicago time (3:22 PM Florida time).
What Time Is the SpaceX Astronaut Launch? How to Watch
By The New York Times
May 30, 2020 Updated 7:54 a.m. ET
When is the launch, and how can I watch it?
On Saturday, for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles in July 2011, NASA astronauts are scheduled to blast off from American soil on an American rocket to the International Space Station. In contrast to astronaut launches in the past when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, will be in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon, which the two astronauts will travel in.
The mission is scheduled to lift off at 3:22 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Coverage of the launch on NASA Television will begin at 11 a.m. The Times will provide live video of the launch.
The first attempt to launch, on Wednesday, was called off about 15 minutes before it was to occur because the weather wasn’t playing nice. SpaceX’s launch directors deemed the risk of lightning and other weather hazards too high to allow the astronauts to lift off safely.
The weather officers said that they expected conditions to clear up about 10 minutes after the scheduled launch time. But in order for the capsule to catch the space station at the right moment the next day, the launch had to go off at the precise time of 4:33 p.m. Eastern time.
How’s the weather looking today?
Not the most promising. Weather forecasts currently give a 50 percent chance of favorable conditions at the launch site. Mr. Musk said on Twitter early Saturday morning that the countdown was proceeding. The next opportunity on Sunday is slightly better, with a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions.
Lifting off in bad weather can be catastrophic to rockets. During the countdown, about 10 members of the 45th Weather Squadron, part of the United States Space Force, keep a close eye on conditions to see if they fall within predetermined launch criteria. If the weather conditions violate the criteria, SpaceX’s launch director will call off the launch.
The launch has to occur at a precise moment to allow the Crew Dragon to meet up with the space station, and there is no leeway for delays.
For the safety of the crew, the launch team also has to consider weather and ocean conditions just off the coast, where the capsule would splash down if there were an emergency on the launchpad or farther away in the Atlantic if a problem occurred on the way to orbit.
Who is blasting off?
The astronauts are Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, who have been friends and colleagues since both were selected by NASA to be astronauts in 2000.
They both have backgrounds as military test pilots and have each flown twice previously on space shuttle missions, although this is the first time they have worked together on a mission. Mr. Hurley flew on the space shuttle’s final mission in 2011.
In 2015, they were among the astronauts chosen to work with Boeing and SpaceX on the commercial space vehicles that the companies were developing. In 2018, they were assigned to the first SpaceX flight.
MEET THE ASTRONAUTS
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are good friends, and ready for their trip to orbit.
What are they flying in?
SpaceX has never taken people to space before. Its Crew Dragon is a gumdrop-shaped capsule — an upgraded version of SpaceX’s original Dragon capsule, which has been used many times to carry cargo, but not people, to the space station.
Crew Dragon has space for up to seven people but will have only four seats for NASA missions. If this launch succeeds, it will ferry four astronauts to the space station later in the year.
When will the astronauts arrive at the space station?
The Crew Dragon is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station 19 hours after launch on Sunday, at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. During their trip, the astronauts will test to test how the spacecraft flies and verify that the systems are performing as designed. Unless something goes wrong, the Crew Dragon’s computers usually handle all of the maneuvering and docking procedures.
The astronauts also said they planned to test out the capsule’s toilet.
I'm also going to watch the SpaceX thing be canceled again because of the weather at LIVE NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV. If despite the odds the SpaceX thing goes to the International Space Station, it will take off at 2:22 PM Chicago time (3:22 PM Florida time).
What Time Is the SpaceX Astronaut Launch? How to Watch
By The New York Times
May 30, 2020 Updated 7:54 a.m. ET
When is the launch, and how can I watch it?
On Saturday, for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles in July 2011, NASA astronauts are scheduled to blast off from American soil on an American rocket to the International Space Station. In contrast to astronaut launches in the past when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, will be in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon, which the two astronauts will travel in.
The mission is scheduled to lift off at 3:22 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Coverage of the launch on NASA Television will begin at 11 a.m. The Times will provide live video of the launch.
The first attempt to launch, on Wednesday, was called off about 15 minutes before it was to occur because the weather wasn’t playing nice. SpaceX’s launch directors deemed the risk of lightning and other weather hazards too high to allow the astronauts to lift off safely.
The weather officers said that they expected conditions to clear up about 10 minutes after the scheduled launch time. But in order for the capsule to catch the space station at the right moment the next day, the launch had to go off at the precise time of 4:33 p.m. Eastern time.
How’s the weather looking today?
Not the most promising. Weather forecasts currently give a 50 percent chance of favorable conditions at the launch site. Mr. Musk said on Twitter early Saturday morning that the countdown was proceeding. The next opportunity on Sunday is slightly better, with a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions.
Lifting off in bad weather can be catastrophic to rockets. During the countdown, about 10 members of the 45th Weather Squadron, part of the United States Space Force, keep a close eye on conditions to see if they fall within predetermined launch criteria. If the weather conditions violate the criteria, SpaceX’s launch director will call off the launch.
The launch has to occur at a precise moment to allow the Crew Dragon to meet up with the space station, and there is no leeway for delays.
For the safety of the crew, the launch team also has to consider weather and ocean conditions just off the coast, where the capsule would splash down if there were an emergency on the launchpad or farther away in the Atlantic if a problem occurred on the way to orbit.
Who is blasting off?
The astronauts are Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, who have been friends and colleagues since both were selected by NASA to be astronauts in 2000.
They both have backgrounds as military test pilots and have each flown twice previously on space shuttle missions, although this is the first time they have worked together on a mission. Mr. Hurley flew on the space shuttle’s final mission in 2011.
In 2015, they were among the astronauts chosen to work with Boeing and SpaceX on the commercial space vehicles that the companies were developing. In 2018, they were assigned to the first SpaceX flight.
MEET THE ASTRONAUTS
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are good friends, and ready for their trip to orbit.
What are they flying in?
SpaceX has never taken people to space before. Its Crew Dragon is a gumdrop-shaped capsule — an upgraded version of SpaceX’s original Dragon capsule, which has been used many times to carry cargo, but not people, to the space station.
Crew Dragon has space for up to seven people but will have only four seats for NASA missions. If this launch succeeds, it will ferry four astronauts to the space station later in the year.
When will the astronauts arrive at the space station?
The Crew Dragon is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station 19 hours after launch on Sunday, at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. During their trip, the astronauts will test to test how the spacecraft flies and verify that the systems are performing as designed. Unless something goes wrong, the Crew Dragon’s computers usually handle all of the maneuvering and docking procedures.
The astronauts also said they planned to test out the capsule’s toilet.
Friday, May 29, 2020
SARS-CoV-2
ScienceDaily
Evolution of pandemic coronavirus outlines path from animals to humans
The virus's ability to change makes it likely that new human coronaviruses will arise.
Date: May 29, 2020
Source: Duke University Medical Center
Summary: A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.
A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.
Conducting a genetic analysis, researchers from Duke University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Texas at El Paso and New York University confirmed that the closest relative of the virus was a coronavirus that infects bats. But that virus's ability to infect humans was gained through exchanging a critical gene fragment from a coronavirus that infects a scaly mammal called a pangolin, which made it possible for the virus to infect humans.
The researchers report that this jump from species-to-species was the result of the virus's ability to bind to host cells through alterations in its genetic material. By analogy, it is as if the virus retooled the key that enables it to unlock a host cell's door -- in this case a human cell. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the "key" is a spike protein found on the surface of the virus. Coronaviruses use this protein to attach to cells and infect them.
"Very much like the original SARS that jumped from bats to civets, or MERS that went from bats to dromedary camels, and then to humans, the progenitor of this pandemic coronavirus underwent evolutionary changes in its genetic material that enabled it to eventually infect humans," said Feng Gao, M.D., professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University School of Medicine and corresponding author of the study publishing online May 29 in the journal Science Advances.
Gao and colleagues said tracing the virus's evolutionary pathway will help deter future pandemics arising from the virus and possibly guide vaccine research.
The researchers found that typical pangolin coronaviruses are too different from SARS-CoV-2 for them to have directly caused the human pandemic.
However, they do contain a receptor-binding site -- a part of the spike protein necessary to bind to the cell membrane -- that is important for human infection. This binding site makes it possible to affix to a cell surface protein that is abundant on human respiratory and intestinal epithelial cells, endothelial cell and kidney cells, among others.
While the viral ancestor in the bat is the most closely related coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2, its binding site is very different, and on its own cannot efficiently infect human cells.
SARS-CoV-2 appears to be a hybrid between bat and pangolin viruses to obtain the "key" necessary receptor-binding site for human infection.
"There are regions of the virus with a very high degree of similarity of amino acid sequences among divergent coronaviruses that infect humans, bats and pangolins, suggesting that these viruses are under similar host selection and may have made the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 able to readily jump from these animals to humans," said lead co-author Xiaojun Li from Duke.
"People had already looked at the coronavirus sequences sampled from pangolins that we discuss in our paper, however, the scientific community was still divided on whether they played a role in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2," said study co-lead author Elena Giorgi, staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"In our study, we demonstrated that indeed SARS-CoV-2 has a rich evolutionary history that included a reshuffling of genetic material between bat and pangolin coronavirus before it acquired its ability to jump to humans," Giorgi said.
In addition to Gao, Li and Giorgi, study authors include, Manukumar Honnayakanahalli Marichannegowda, Brian Foley, Chuan Xiao, Xiang-Peng Kong, Yue Chen, S. Gnanakaran and Bette Korber.
Evolution of pandemic coronavirus outlines path from animals to humans
The virus's ability to change makes it likely that new human coronaviruses will arise.
Date: May 29, 2020
Source: Duke University Medical Center
Summary: A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.
A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.
Conducting a genetic analysis, researchers from Duke University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Texas at El Paso and New York University confirmed that the closest relative of the virus was a coronavirus that infects bats. But that virus's ability to infect humans was gained through exchanging a critical gene fragment from a coronavirus that infects a scaly mammal called a pangolin, which made it possible for the virus to infect humans.
The researchers report that this jump from species-to-species was the result of the virus's ability to bind to host cells through alterations in its genetic material. By analogy, it is as if the virus retooled the key that enables it to unlock a host cell's door -- in this case a human cell. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the "key" is a spike protein found on the surface of the virus. Coronaviruses use this protein to attach to cells and infect them.
"Very much like the original SARS that jumped from bats to civets, or MERS that went from bats to dromedary camels, and then to humans, the progenitor of this pandemic coronavirus underwent evolutionary changes in its genetic material that enabled it to eventually infect humans," said Feng Gao, M.D., professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University School of Medicine and corresponding author of the study publishing online May 29 in the journal Science Advances.
Gao and colleagues said tracing the virus's evolutionary pathway will help deter future pandemics arising from the virus and possibly guide vaccine research.
The researchers found that typical pangolin coronaviruses are too different from SARS-CoV-2 for them to have directly caused the human pandemic.
However, they do contain a receptor-binding site -- a part of the spike protein necessary to bind to the cell membrane -- that is important for human infection. This binding site makes it possible to affix to a cell surface protein that is abundant on human respiratory and intestinal epithelial cells, endothelial cell and kidney cells, among others.
While the viral ancestor in the bat is the most closely related coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2, its binding site is very different, and on its own cannot efficiently infect human cells.
SARS-CoV-2 appears to be a hybrid between bat and pangolin viruses to obtain the "key" necessary receptor-binding site for human infection.
"There are regions of the virus with a very high degree of similarity of amino acid sequences among divergent coronaviruses that infect humans, bats and pangolins, suggesting that these viruses are under similar host selection and may have made the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 able to readily jump from these animals to humans," said lead co-author Xiaojun Li from Duke.
"People had already looked at the coronavirus sequences sampled from pangolins that we discuss in our paper, however, the scientific community was still divided on whether they played a role in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2," said study co-lead author Elena Giorgi, staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"In our study, we demonstrated that indeed SARS-CoV-2 has a rich evolutionary history that included a reshuffling of genetic material between bat and pangolin coronavirus before it acquired its ability to jump to humans," Giorgi said.
In addition to Gao, Li and Giorgi, study authors include, Manukumar Honnayakanahalli Marichannegowda, Brian Foley, Chuan Xiao, Xiang-Peng Kong, Yue Chen, S. Gnanakaran and Bette Korber.
There are some things in the ridiculous bible that are just plain fucking stupid.
Someone else wrote this and I agree with it:
Posted by u/psillyjoesmho
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1
Is this not the dumbest crap you’ve ever read? This concept is such an atrocity if taught to children, allowing them to believe that their beliefs are evidence for anything. The Bible literally tells you that faith alone is evidence for god. By this logic, faith is evidence for unicorns, ghosts, fairies, Santa, the spaghetti monster, imaginary friends, etc. basically, if I hope for something, and if I have faith, that’s undeniable evidence that said supernatural is real. Damn.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
I have seen this bullshit bible quote numerous times. The Christian fucktards think this gibberish is a big fucking deal and they think it makes sense.
I never met a Christian who wasn't a fucking retard.
Posted by u/psillyjoesmho
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1
Is this not the dumbest crap you’ve ever read? This concept is such an atrocity if taught to children, allowing them to believe that their beliefs are evidence for anything. The Bible literally tells you that faith alone is evidence for god. By this logic, faith is evidence for unicorns, ghosts, fairies, Santa, the spaghetti monster, imaginary friends, etc. basically, if I hope for something, and if I have faith, that’s undeniable evidence that said supernatural is real. Damn.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
I have seen this bullshit bible quote numerous times. The Christian fucktards think this gibberish is a big fucking deal and they think it makes sense.
I never met a Christian who wasn't a fucking retard.
Christian retards and Muslim scum, your cowardly heaven fantasy is fucking impossible. Grow up and face facts you fucking morons.
There is no heaven, no magical 2nd life, because it's fucking impossible. The fantasy requires throwing out all of reality but reality is not going anywhere. Heaven is absolutely fucking impossible. Period.
And thank goodness the heaven fantasy is bullshit. I would not want to live in a universe where magical bullshit was real.
RationalWiki has something about it. For example this: "the odds of this being true are infinitesimally small."
"Infinitesimally small" is wrong. The odds are exactly zero.
Here is some of the stuff from RationalWiki. You can click the link if you want to read the whole thing.
There is something there about Muslim scum who blow themselves up. This means heaven is much worse than a ridiculous fantasy for cowardly gullible morons. It's a fucking weapon that, for example, caused the death of 3,000 Americans in one day on September 11, 2001.
RationalWiki - Heaven
Heaven is a fictional realm where the magical essence of a human (known as a soul) somehow survives death and is fantastically transported to this zone of paradise to spend forever and ever and ever times eternity. Most commonly known by believers of the book (Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims) as the place up in the clouds (no one has seen it from a plane or a rocket-ship) heaven is where you go to meet the bearded man in the sky (God) and in most versions praise him forever. Some believers of the book see heaven as allegorical for something but it is almost universally depicted as a real ghostly happy afterlife. Heaven is referred to quite differently by other religions, sometimes conceptually such as: a place/emotion/plane of existence/state of mind/spiritual realm. Unfortunately the soul and all forms of the afterlife are human constructions used as emotional crutches to deal with death and/or to help spread religions as rewards for believing. So as lovely as being reunited with your family members and old pets in heaven sounds the odds of this being true are infinitesimally small. You aren't going to heaven when you die.
Within the believers of the book some conjecture heaven is a dimension of new possibilities where you can realize whatever you want (without any scriptural basis), to watching sinners burn in hell, to grovelling to God all day, to a spiritual experience beyond comprehension.
Heaven is viewed as grotesque by some New Atheists who challenge the idea of still being happy in heaven after the first octillion years or how a God could be so insecure he literally needs millions of souls praising him for eternity. The logical inconsistencies are also pronounced: how could a Christian enjoy bliss in heaven knowing some of their loved ones are burning for eternity in hell? Heaven is used obsessively as blackmail to convert people to Christianity and Islam. And finally per those two religions, the idea that people are destined to either heaven or hell seems to lack any sense of moral justice or any proportionality of reward or punishment for what is a very short life on Earth navigating morally ambiguous problems without any evidence that heaven or even God exists.
And thank goodness the heaven fantasy is bullshit. I would not want to live in a universe where magical bullshit was real.
RationalWiki has something about it. For example this: "the odds of this being true are infinitesimally small."
"Infinitesimally small" is wrong. The odds are exactly zero.
Here is some of the stuff from RationalWiki. You can click the link if you want to read the whole thing.
There is something there about Muslim scum who blow themselves up. This means heaven is much worse than a ridiculous fantasy for cowardly gullible morons. It's a fucking weapon that, for example, caused the death of 3,000 Americans in one day on September 11, 2001.
RationalWiki - Heaven
Heaven is a fictional realm where the magical essence of a human (known as a soul) somehow survives death and is fantastically transported to this zone of paradise to spend forever and ever and ever times eternity. Most commonly known by believers of the book (Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims) as the place up in the clouds (no one has seen it from a plane or a rocket-ship) heaven is where you go to meet the bearded man in the sky (God) and in most versions praise him forever. Some believers of the book see heaven as allegorical for something but it is almost universally depicted as a real ghostly happy afterlife. Heaven is referred to quite differently by other religions, sometimes conceptually such as: a place/emotion/plane of existence/state of mind/spiritual realm. Unfortunately the soul and all forms of the afterlife are human constructions used as emotional crutches to deal with death and/or to help spread religions as rewards for believing. So as lovely as being reunited with your family members and old pets in heaven sounds the odds of this being true are infinitesimally small. You aren't going to heaven when you die.
Within the believers of the book some conjecture heaven is a dimension of new possibilities where you can realize whatever you want (without any scriptural basis), to watching sinners burn in hell, to grovelling to God all day, to a spiritual experience beyond comprehension.
Heaven is viewed as grotesque by some New Atheists who challenge the idea of still being happy in heaven after the first octillion years or how a God could be so insecure he literally needs millions of souls praising him for eternity. The logical inconsistencies are also pronounced: how could a Christian enjoy bliss in heaven knowing some of their loved ones are burning for eternity in hell? Heaven is used obsessively as blackmail to convert people to Christianity and Islam. And finally per those two religions, the idea that people are destined to either heaven or hell seems to lack any sense of moral justice or any proportionality of reward or punishment for what is a very short life on Earth navigating morally ambiguous problems without any evidence that heaven or even God exists.
This is very unfortunate.
New York Times
BREAKING
Trump Moves to Strip Hong Kong of Special U.S. Relationship
The president, angered by China’s security crackdown in Hong Kong and its handling of the coronavirus, said he would also terminate the United States’ relationship with the World Health Organization.
By Michael Crowley, Edward Wong and Ana Swanson
May 29, 2020
WASHINGTON — President Trump announced Friday that his administration would end almost all aspects of the American government’s special relationship with Hong Kong, including on trade and law enforcement, and that it was withdrawing from the World Health Organization, where the United States has been by far the largest funder.
Speaking at a news conference in the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Trump voiced a range of grievances against China, angrily denouncing the country’s trade and security practices and its handling of the initial coronavirus outbreak.
As punishment, Mr. Trump said he would strip away Hong Kong’s privileges with the United States, ranging from an extradition treaty to commercial relations, with few exceptions.
“My announcement today will affect the full range of agreements we have with Hong Kong,” he said, including “action to revoke Hong Kong’s preferential treatment as a separate customs and travel territory from the rest of China.”
Mr. Trump’s announcement came largely in response to Beijing’s move this week to put in place broad new national security powers over Hong Kong. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he was reporting to Congress a determination that Hong Kong no longer had significant autonomy under Chinese rule. Mr. Pompeo had earlier called the new Chinese law a “death knell” for the territory, a global financial and commercial hub with special status under American law because, in theory, it has semiautonomy until 2047 under an international treaty that Britain and China signed.
Mr. Pompeo’s finding amounted to a recommendation that the United States should reconsider its special relationship with Hong Kong. A 1992 law says the United States should continue to treat the Beijing-ruled territory under the same conditions it did when it was a British colony.
Mr. Trump made clear on Friday that he no longer considered Hong Kong to be separate from China.
“China claims it is protecting national security. But the truth is that Hong Kong was secure and prosperous as a free society. Beijing’s decision reverses all of that. It extends the reach of China’s invasive state security apparatus into what was formally a bastion of liberty,” Mr. Trump said.
He said the United States would suspend the entry of some Chinese citizens who have been identified as “potential security risks.” He did not give details, but appeared to be referring to a move to cancel the visas of graduate students and researchers who attended Chinese universities with ties to the military.
The New York Times reported this week that American officials had decided to go ahead with the action, which would affect thousands of Chinese students, a tiny percentage of the total number from China studying in the country.
Mr. Trump also repeated past charges that China had mishandled the coronavirus outbreak and suggested that Chinese officials had knowingly allowed travelers to fly from Wuhan to other countries, including the United States, while limiting access from Wuhan to other cities within China.
It was unclear from Mr. Trump’s announcement whether he was issuing a formal executive order to end the special relationship with Hong Kong entirely. The administration can take piecemeal actions — for example, imposing the same tariffs on goods from Hong Kong that the United States does on products from mainland China — before taking that final, drastic step.
Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
Michael Crowley is a White House correspondent, covering President Trump’s foreign policy. He joined The Times in 2019 from Politico, where he was the White House and national security editor, and a foreign affairs correspondent. @michaelcrowley
Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 from Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. @ewong
Ana Swanson is based in the Washington bureau and covers trade and international economics for The New York Times. She previously worked at The Washington Post, where she wrote about trade, the Federal Reserve and the economy. @AnaSwanson
BREAKING
Trump Moves to Strip Hong Kong of Special U.S. Relationship
The president, angered by China’s security crackdown in Hong Kong and its handling of the coronavirus, said he would also terminate the United States’ relationship with the World Health Organization.
By Michael Crowley, Edward Wong and Ana Swanson
May 29, 2020
WASHINGTON — President Trump announced Friday that his administration would end almost all aspects of the American government’s special relationship with Hong Kong, including on trade and law enforcement, and that it was withdrawing from the World Health Organization, where the United States has been by far the largest funder.
Speaking at a news conference in the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Trump voiced a range of grievances against China, angrily denouncing the country’s trade and security practices and its handling of the initial coronavirus outbreak.
As punishment, Mr. Trump said he would strip away Hong Kong’s privileges with the United States, ranging from an extradition treaty to commercial relations, with few exceptions.
“My announcement today will affect the full range of agreements we have with Hong Kong,” he said, including “action to revoke Hong Kong’s preferential treatment as a separate customs and travel territory from the rest of China.”
Mr. Trump’s announcement came largely in response to Beijing’s move this week to put in place broad new national security powers over Hong Kong. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he was reporting to Congress a determination that Hong Kong no longer had significant autonomy under Chinese rule. Mr. Pompeo had earlier called the new Chinese law a “death knell” for the territory, a global financial and commercial hub with special status under American law because, in theory, it has semiautonomy until 2047 under an international treaty that Britain and China signed.
Mr. Pompeo’s finding amounted to a recommendation that the United States should reconsider its special relationship with Hong Kong. A 1992 law says the United States should continue to treat the Beijing-ruled territory under the same conditions it did when it was a British colony.
Mr. Trump made clear on Friday that he no longer considered Hong Kong to be separate from China.
“China claims it is protecting national security. But the truth is that Hong Kong was secure and prosperous as a free society. Beijing’s decision reverses all of that. It extends the reach of China’s invasive state security apparatus into what was formally a bastion of liberty,” Mr. Trump said.
He said the United States would suspend the entry of some Chinese citizens who have been identified as “potential security risks.” He did not give details, but appeared to be referring to a move to cancel the visas of graduate students and researchers who attended Chinese universities with ties to the military.
The New York Times reported this week that American officials had decided to go ahead with the action, which would affect thousands of Chinese students, a tiny percentage of the total number from China studying in the country.
Mr. Trump also repeated past charges that China had mishandled the coronavirus outbreak and suggested that Chinese officials had knowingly allowed travelers to fly from Wuhan to other countries, including the United States, while limiting access from Wuhan to other cities within China.
It was unclear from Mr. Trump’s announcement whether he was issuing a formal executive order to end the special relationship with Hong Kong entirely. The administration can take piecemeal actions — for example, imposing the same tariffs on goods from Hong Kong that the United States does on products from mainland China — before taking that final, drastic step.
Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
Michael Crowley is a White House correspondent, covering President Trump’s foreign policy. He joined The Times in 2019 from Politico, where he was the White House and national security editor, and a foreign affairs correspondent. @michaelcrowley
Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 from Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. @ewong
Ana Swanson is based in the Washington bureau and covers trade and international economics for The New York Times. She previously worked at The Washington Post, where she wrote about trade, the Federal Reserve and the economy. @AnaSwanson
Human-caused global warming is going to kill this planet. A Washington Post article about zombie fires in Alaska and Siberia.
The Washington Post
Capital Weather Gang
‘Zombie fires’ are erupting in Alaska and likely Siberia, signaling severe Arctic fire season may lie ahead
Move over, ‘murder hornets.’ There’s a new 2020 phenomenon to worry about.
By Andrew Freedman
May 28, 2020
The bitterly cold Arctic winter typically snuffs out the seasonal wildfires that erupt in this region. But every once in a while, a wildfire comes along that refuses to die.
These blazes, known as “zombie fires” or “holdover fires,” can burrow into the rich organic material beneath the surface, such as the vast peatlands that ring the Arctic, and smolder under the snowpack throughout the frigid winter.
With the Siberian Arctic seeing record warm conditions in recent weeks and months, scientists monitoring Arctic wildfire trends are becoming more convinced that some of the blazes erupting in the Arctic this spring are actually left over from last summer.
[Parts of Siberia are hotter than Washington, with temperatures nearly 40 degrees above average]
Last year brought a record surge in fires to a region that is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world. The Arctic contains vast stores of carbon and other planet-warming greenhouse gases in its soils, in peat as well as frozen soil known as permafrost, that can be freed up through combustion. Peatlands are wetlands that contain ancient, decomposed and partially decomposed organic matter.
According to Mark Parrington, senior scientist and wildfire expert at the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), recent Arctic fire detections have been found in areas where blazes were burning last summer, which lines up with regions affected by warmer-than-average and unusually dry surface conditions.
“We know from the climate data provided by C3S that the Arctic Circle regions most affected by fires in 2019 were experiencing warmer and drier surface conditions, providing the ideal environment for fires to burn and persist,” Parrington said in a news release, referring to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Scientists such as Parrington use satellite sensors to detect hot spots that could indicate wildfire activity.
“We have seen satellite observations of active fires that hint that ‘Zombie’ fires might have reignited, yet it has not been confirmed by ground measurements,” Parrington said. “The anomalies are quite widespread in areas that were burning last summer.”
“If this is the case, then under certain environmental conditions, we may see a cumulative effect of last year’s fire season in the Arctic which will feed into the upcoming season and could lead to large-scale and long-term fires across the same region once again,” he continued.
A real-world version of the fire swamp
January-to-April temperature departures from average, showing the most significant temperature anomalies across Russia, including Siberia. (Berkeley Earth)
Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher at the University of Alberta, says zombie fires are not unheard of, citing the destructive Fort McMurray fire in Alberta that burned for more than a year during 2016 and 2017.
“Fires are popping up early this year, and some of them are fires that burned through the winter,” Flannigan said in an interview.
In April, fire technicians riding snowmobiles found a zombie fire smoldering near Willow, Alaska, and officials have been on the lookout for other similar zombie blazes.
North-central Siberia experienced record heat last week, which came on the heels of a record-warm winter. Several stations in north-central Siberia, including areas near or above the Arctic Circle, saw temperatures climb well into the 80s.
On May 22, the Siberian town of Khatanga, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees, about 46 degrees above normal. The typical maximum temperature for that day at that location is 32 degrees. The town obliterated its previous record high for the date, 54 degrees, and its monthly record, 68 degrees.
The Siberian warmth in May has not been a fluke event, either; instead, it has been a consistent feature since the winter. Temperature departures from average in Europe and Asia have helped push global average surface temperatures to record highs this year; on global temperature maps, these regions stand out as splotches of crimson red.
[Wildfires ravaged Siberia last year. This spring, the blazes are starting even bigger.]
The temperature departures from average in Siberia this year are some of the highest of any area on Earth. Since January, the region has been running at least 5.4 degrees (3 Celsius) above the long-term average, according to a recent report from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to Robert Rohde of Berkeley Earth, which monitors global temperature trends, Russia averaged a temperature anomaly of nearly 11 degrees (6 Celsius) above average for the January-to-April period.
“That’s not only a new record anomaly for Russia,” Rohde wrote on Twitter. “That’s the largest January to April anomaly ever seen in any country’s national average.”
Such warmth has dramatic repercussions for the landscape, primarily through evapotranspiration, the process by which plants and soils release moisture into the atmosphere. As temperatures increase, so too does the moisture exchanged between the soils and the air. “When temperatures warm up, [the air is] much more efficient at sucking the moisture out of the fuel,” Flannigan said.
The heat is causing snow cover to melt and is accelerating the drying of soils, including peatlands, that would be more resistant to burning under wetter conditions.
Historically, Arctic peatlands served as a fire break, says Mike Waddington, an ecohydrologist at McMaster University in Canada. “Now it’s more of a fire propagator” because of increasing temperatures that make it easier for soils to dry out quickly, he said. Not only are these carbon-rich landscapes more prone to burning, but Arctic wildfires are also burning deeper into the soils, freeing more carbon into the atmosphere in a feedback loop that enhances warming.
[The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback]
The drying and burning of Arctic peatlands has major consequences for the planet as a whole. Northern peatlands contain more stored carbon than rainforests do, Waddington said. He compared fires that smolder during the winter without flames, only to reignite in the spring, to scenes from the fire swamp in the 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” which features bursts of flame emerging from underground.
Waddington’s research has shown that northern peatlands are likely to dry faster than forests, and he said burning more peatlands will lead to more carbon emissions. There is more carbon stored in northern peatlands (including boreal forests, sub-Arctic areas and the Arctic itself), than is contained in tropical rainforests, Waddington said.
“These issues are things that scientists have been warning about: The extremes are getting worse. They’ll be more drying, more fire, bigger fire, more carbon dioxide” released into the air,” he said. “It’s something we are expecting, and if we are seeing it now, 10, 15, 20 years from now it’s only going to be worse.”
Flannigan says the relationship between temperature and wildfires is rather simple: “The warmer it gets, the more fire we see.”
Capital Weather Gang
‘Zombie fires’ are erupting in Alaska and likely Siberia, signaling severe Arctic fire season may lie ahead
Move over, ‘murder hornets.’ There’s a new 2020 phenomenon to worry about.
By Andrew Freedman
May 28, 2020
The bitterly cold Arctic winter typically snuffs out the seasonal wildfires that erupt in this region. But every once in a while, a wildfire comes along that refuses to die.
These blazes, known as “zombie fires” or “holdover fires,” can burrow into the rich organic material beneath the surface, such as the vast peatlands that ring the Arctic, and smolder under the snowpack throughout the frigid winter.
With the Siberian Arctic seeing record warm conditions in recent weeks and months, scientists monitoring Arctic wildfire trends are becoming more convinced that some of the blazes erupting in the Arctic this spring are actually left over from last summer.
[Parts of Siberia are hotter than Washington, with temperatures nearly 40 degrees above average]
Last year brought a record surge in fires to a region that is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world. The Arctic contains vast stores of carbon and other planet-warming greenhouse gases in its soils, in peat as well as frozen soil known as permafrost, that can be freed up through combustion. Peatlands are wetlands that contain ancient, decomposed and partially decomposed organic matter.
According to Mark Parrington, senior scientist and wildfire expert at the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), recent Arctic fire detections have been found in areas where blazes were burning last summer, which lines up with regions affected by warmer-than-average and unusually dry surface conditions.
“We know from the climate data provided by C3S that the Arctic Circle regions most affected by fires in 2019 were experiencing warmer and drier surface conditions, providing the ideal environment for fires to burn and persist,” Parrington said in a news release, referring to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Scientists such as Parrington use satellite sensors to detect hot spots that could indicate wildfire activity.
“We have seen satellite observations of active fires that hint that ‘Zombie’ fires might have reignited, yet it has not been confirmed by ground measurements,” Parrington said. “The anomalies are quite widespread in areas that were burning last summer.”
“If this is the case, then under certain environmental conditions, we may see a cumulative effect of last year’s fire season in the Arctic which will feed into the upcoming season and could lead to large-scale and long-term fires across the same region once again,” he continued.
A real-world version of the fire swamp
January-to-April temperature departures from average, showing the most significant temperature anomalies across Russia, including Siberia. (Berkeley Earth)
Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher at the University of Alberta, says zombie fires are not unheard of, citing the destructive Fort McMurray fire in Alberta that burned for more than a year during 2016 and 2017.
“Fires are popping up early this year, and some of them are fires that burned through the winter,” Flannigan said in an interview.
In April, fire technicians riding snowmobiles found a zombie fire smoldering near Willow, Alaska, and officials have been on the lookout for other similar zombie blazes.
North-central Siberia experienced record heat last week, which came on the heels of a record-warm winter. Several stations in north-central Siberia, including areas near or above the Arctic Circle, saw temperatures climb well into the 80s.
On May 22, the Siberian town of Khatanga, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees, about 46 degrees above normal. The typical maximum temperature for that day at that location is 32 degrees. The town obliterated its previous record high for the date, 54 degrees, and its monthly record, 68 degrees.
The Siberian warmth in May has not been a fluke event, either; instead, it has been a consistent feature since the winter. Temperature departures from average in Europe and Asia have helped push global average surface temperatures to record highs this year; on global temperature maps, these regions stand out as splotches of crimson red.
[Wildfires ravaged Siberia last year. This spring, the blazes are starting even bigger.]
The temperature departures from average in Siberia this year are some of the highest of any area on Earth. Since January, the region has been running at least 5.4 degrees (3 Celsius) above the long-term average, according to a recent report from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to Robert Rohde of Berkeley Earth, which monitors global temperature trends, Russia averaged a temperature anomaly of nearly 11 degrees (6 Celsius) above average for the January-to-April period.
“That’s not only a new record anomaly for Russia,” Rohde wrote on Twitter. “That’s the largest January to April anomaly ever seen in any country’s national average.”
Such warmth has dramatic repercussions for the landscape, primarily through evapotranspiration, the process by which plants and soils release moisture into the atmosphere. As temperatures increase, so too does the moisture exchanged between the soils and the air. “When temperatures warm up, [the air is] much more efficient at sucking the moisture out of the fuel,” Flannigan said.
The heat is causing snow cover to melt and is accelerating the drying of soils, including peatlands, that would be more resistant to burning under wetter conditions.
Historically, Arctic peatlands served as a fire break, says Mike Waddington, an ecohydrologist at McMaster University in Canada. “Now it’s more of a fire propagator” because of increasing temperatures that make it easier for soils to dry out quickly, he said. Not only are these carbon-rich landscapes more prone to burning, but Arctic wildfires are also burning deeper into the soils, freeing more carbon into the atmosphere in a feedback loop that enhances warming.
[The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback]
The drying and burning of Arctic peatlands has major consequences for the planet as a whole. Northern peatlands contain more stored carbon than rainforests do, Waddington said. He compared fires that smolder during the winter without flames, only to reignite in the spring, to scenes from the fire swamp in the 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” which features bursts of flame emerging from underground.
Waddington’s research has shown that northern peatlands are likely to dry faster than forests, and he said burning more peatlands will lead to more carbon emissions. There is more carbon stored in northern peatlands (including boreal forests, sub-Arctic areas and the Arctic itself), than is contained in tropical rainforests, Waddington said.
“These issues are things that scientists have been warning about: The extremes are getting worse. They’ll be more drying, more fire, bigger fire, more carbon dioxide” released into the air,” he said. “It’s something we are expecting, and if we are seeing it now, 10, 15, 20 years from now it’s only going to be worse.”
Flannigan says the relationship between temperature and wildfires is rather simple: “The warmer it gets, the more fire we see.”
I recommend this BBC video about a young woman who lives with some beautiful spiders.
BBC News - Why I spent lockdown with 70 spiders
When Covid-19 hit, zookeeper Caitlin Henderson ended up in lockdown with 70 spiders
Caitlin Henderson was working for a spider exhibition when the coronavirus pandemic hit. The venue closed, and suddenly she was living in lockdown with 70 spiders in her bedroom.
Producers: Maryam Maruf and Alice Gioia.
- 29 May 2020
The Wall Street Journal is infested with Christian morons who can't exist without their childish Magic Man fantasies. But some people who read the Wall Street Journal have a brain.
A normal person (aka atheist) wrote this at the Wall Street Journal:
"...modern science rests on the foundation of Judeo-Christianity, with its belief in a rational God..." Nothing could be further from the truth, sir. Did the god of the Hebrew bible not "frequently [act] out of spite, jealousy or some other emotion"? And come on--ALL religions are based on magical thinking.
Religion will always, and as always, had to capitulate and move out of the way, when science shows something to be demonstrably true. The god in which/whom we were taught to believe is all powerful and all loving. You've heard it before, I'm sure; but the question rings, inadequately answered, throughout the centuries:
God is all powerful; god is all loving; god is good. So, if he could stop the Covid deaths (being all powerful) and doesn't, he isn't all loving and good. If he deeply wishes the agony and death would stop, but can't stop it, then he's not all powerful. Whence god?
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What I wrote:
"And come on--ALL religions are based on magical thinking."
Well done. Every religion ever invented is a belief in magic. The Magic Man did it. The fantasies are childish, ridiculous, and they don't belong in the 21st century.
"...modern science rests on the foundation of Judeo-Christianity, with its belief in a rational God..." Nothing could be further from the truth, sir. Did the god of the Hebrew bible not "frequently [act] out of spite, jealousy or some other emotion"? And come on--ALL religions are based on magical thinking.
Religion will always, and as always, had to capitulate and move out of the way, when science shows something to be demonstrably true. The god in which/whom we were taught to believe is all powerful and all loving. You've heard it before, I'm sure; but the question rings, inadequately answered, throughout the centuries:
God is all powerful; god is all loving; god is good. So, if he could stop the Covid deaths (being all powerful) and doesn't, he isn't all loving and good. If he deeply wishes the agony and death would stop, but can't stop it, then he's not all powerful. Whence god?
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What I wrote:
"And come on--ALL religions are based on magical thinking."
Well done. Every religion ever invented is a belief in magic. The Magic Man did it. The fantasies are childish, ridiculous, and they don't belong in the 21st century.
Wall Street Journal article about SpaceX.
Wall Street Journal
TECH
SpaceX Launch from Florida Canceled Over Bad Weather
Wednesday’s mission with NASA astronauts would have been the first from U.S. soil in nearly a decade; next chance is Saturday.
By Andy Pasztor
May 27, 2020
SpaceX postponed the launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit Wednesday afternoon because of stormy weather, including a tornado warning, less than 20 minutes before the scheduled liftoff.
The countdown up to that point had gone smoothly, and flight controllers didn’t indicate any significant technical issues to hold up the launch.
The long-awaited mission would have represented the first time a company ever flew commercially developed hardware carrying humans and linked up with the international space station. If Space Exploration Technologies Corp. eventually reaches that goal, it will mark a major shift in the country’s space endeavors and the first human launch from U.S. soil since 2011. It would also represent a long-awaited milestone for NASA and a resounding achievement for SpaceX and its billionaire founder, Elon Musk.
The countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., had its share of suspense Wednesday, as weather forecasts hours before predicted only a 50/50 chance of acceptable conditions. The next opportunity comes Saturday.
Rain and high-level winds pose hazards for rockets, and SpaceX staff also monitored weather conditions at dozens of sites around the world in case the astronauts had to separate from the rocket en route for an emergency descent.
President Trump, while touring the space center before launch, was asked if he had a message for the astronauts. “God be with you,” he said. “It’s a dangerous business, but they’re the best there is.”
The Crew Dragon capsule—featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars—has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching Saturday morning, the capsule is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months.
SpaceX’s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top. But if things ultimately go smoothly on the launchpad and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly approve SpaceX’s systems as space taxis that would ferry crews to and from orbit.
For the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a successful flight would represent the culmination of more than eight years of efforts to shift its approach to transporting humans beyond the atmosphere. The agency has long sought to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.
Having a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.
Some longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government “a customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,” said Mark Albrecht, a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. “NASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.”
Beyond the policy changes and revamped contracting arrangements, however, the sheer promise of accelerating human space exploration excites many government and industry officials. Nothing generates as much pride as adding humans to the equation. “When you put an astronaut on top of a rocket, that changes everything,” Air Force Gen. John Hyten, a longtime space expert and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a White House space-policy council last week. “Dreams come when you start flying.”
SpaceX operations, designated essential by authorities, have been largely uninterrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. Launch preparations were conducted with reduced personnel and special precautions involving masks and social distancing. But NASA has gone out of its way to protect the timetable for what it considers its current priority mission, according to people familiar with the details, even at the expense of scrimping on other programs.
“Human space flight is really, really tough,” Benji Reed, director of crew mission management at SpaceX, said during a media teleconference Friday, as he and other speakers sketched out the long push to fix problems that cropped up. As company and NASA engineers work together to identify and alleviate risks, he said, “we are all holding each other accountable.”
Boeing Co. has developed a rival capsule, the Starliner, which has struggled with its own technical challenges and might make a test flight later in the year without astronauts.
SpaceX started in 2002 with barely a dozen employees in a converted warehouse near a Southern California strip mall. The company has become a global powerhouse renowned for reducing prices to launch commercial and government payloads.
With some 7,000 employees, and facilities from Washington state to Texas and Florida, the company already has notched several records: It was the first private entity to place a satellite into Earth’s orbit; the first to land and then reuse major parts of returning rockets; and the first to send spacecraft without humans to link up with the orbiting international laboratory.
After investing a total of more than $7 billion of taxpayer money so far in SpaceX and Boeing efforts to resume astronaut liftoffs from U.S. soil, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine sees a successful launch as recasting the path for America, other nations and industry to reach space. U.S. astronauts “need to have the capability of accessing space, not just for NASA but for all of humanity,” he said this month.
Roughly $3 billion of NASA’s total investment so far in such commercial space taxis has gone to support SpaceX’s work, based on agency documents and space experts’ estimates. Mr. Musk’s company, which hasn’t publicly released details of its own spending, will be paid a fixed price for each astronaut sent into orbit. Separately, experts have estimated SpaceX has invested nearly $1 billion to develop a heavy-lift booster.
By encouraging private investments in such ventures, academics and industry officials said, NASA is increasing the likelihood of getting humans to the moon quickly and establishing a longer-term presence there, instead of depending entirely on federal support.
Traditional government funding strategies, by themselves, won’t be adequate to support U.S. space ambitions, said Howard McCurdy, a space historian at American University. “The [older] financial options certainly aren’t viable; they aren’t going to do it on a Project Apollo model.”
But even a trouble-free demonstration flight isn’t likely to usher in a booming era of smaller, inexpensive rockets—something Mr. Musk and other commercial-space champions once considered inevitable.
“Elon Musk opened the door to making space deals acceptable,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology.
Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have spawned scores of such startups world-wide. But even before the pandemic, only a handful of the new generation of rocket companies appeared to be gaining significant traction. Now, the contagion is creating formidable additional hurdles. With a few prominent exceptions—including Rocket Lab of New Zealand and Blue Origin LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos—the specter of the virus has eroded financing and marketing prospects for many proposed projects.
Virgin Orbit, a small-satellite launch provider founded by Richard Branson, suffered a catastrophic rocket failure seconds into its maiden flight last weekend.
Many SpaceX operations facilities have remained at least partly staffed, in contrast to the recent turmoil surrounding Mr. Musks’s moves to restart production at the Northern California factory of electric-car company, Tesla Inc., in defiance of local authorities.
The safety of the Dragon capsule and its crew depend on a host of complex, interrelated features—from autonomous docking to life-support systems—working in precise sequence on the first try, Mr. McCurdy said. The Russian space agency has achieved a formidable safety record carrying people to space, thanks to its long and steady history of launches.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, told reporters recently she never has to remind her employees about the importance of safety: “They remind themselves.”
Doug Hurley, a veteran NASA astronaut who flew on the final space-shuttle mission and is to be commander on the coming SpaceX launch, told Vice President Mike Pence and the rest of the White House space-policy group that the reality of what is about to happen has yet to sink in: “In some ways, it’s really hard to believe we’re going to launch.”
Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com
TECH
SpaceX Launch from Florida Canceled Over Bad Weather
Wednesday’s mission with NASA astronauts would have been the first from U.S. soil in nearly a decade; next chance is Saturday.
By Andy Pasztor
May 27, 2020
SpaceX postponed the launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit Wednesday afternoon because of stormy weather, including a tornado warning, less than 20 minutes before the scheduled liftoff.
The countdown up to that point had gone smoothly, and flight controllers didn’t indicate any significant technical issues to hold up the launch.
The long-awaited mission would have represented the first time a company ever flew commercially developed hardware carrying humans and linked up with the international space station. If Space Exploration Technologies Corp. eventually reaches that goal, it will mark a major shift in the country’s space endeavors and the first human launch from U.S. soil since 2011. It would also represent a long-awaited milestone for NASA and a resounding achievement for SpaceX and its billionaire founder, Elon Musk.
The countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., had its share of suspense Wednesday, as weather forecasts hours before predicted only a 50/50 chance of acceptable conditions. The next opportunity comes Saturday.
Rain and high-level winds pose hazards for rockets, and SpaceX staff also monitored weather conditions at dozens of sites around the world in case the astronauts had to separate from the rocket en route for an emergency descent.
President Trump, while touring the space center before launch, was asked if he had a message for the astronauts. “God be with you,” he said. “It’s a dangerous business, but they’re the best there is.”
The Crew Dragon capsule—featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars—has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching Saturday morning, the capsule is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months.
SpaceX’s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top. But if things ultimately go smoothly on the launchpad and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly approve SpaceX’s systems as space taxis that would ferry crews to and from orbit.
For the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a successful flight would represent the culmination of more than eight years of efforts to shift its approach to transporting humans beyond the atmosphere. The agency has long sought to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.
Having a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.
Some longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government “a customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,” said Mark Albrecht, a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. “NASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.”
Beyond the policy changes and revamped contracting arrangements, however, the sheer promise of accelerating human space exploration excites many government and industry officials. Nothing generates as much pride as adding humans to the equation. “When you put an astronaut on top of a rocket, that changes everything,” Air Force Gen. John Hyten, a longtime space expert and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a White House space-policy council last week. “Dreams come when you start flying.”
SpaceX operations, designated essential by authorities, have been largely uninterrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. Launch preparations were conducted with reduced personnel and special precautions involving masks and social distancing. But NASA has gone out of its way to protect the timetable for what it considers its current priority mission, according to people familiar with the details, even at the expense of scrimping on other programs.
“Human space flight is really, really tough,” Benji Reed, director of crew mission management at SpaceX, said during a media teleconference Friday, as he and other speakers sketched out the long push to fix problems that cropped up. As company and NASA engineers work together to identify and alleviate risks, he said, “we are all holding each other accountable.”
Boeing Co. has developed a rival capsule, the Starliner, which has struggled with its own technical challenges and might make a test flight later in the year without astronauts.
SpaceX started in 2002 with barely a dozen employees in a converted warehouse near a Southern California strip mall. The company has become a global powerhouse renowned for reducing prices to launch commercial and government payloads.
With some 7,000 employees, and facilities from Washington state to Texas and Florida, the company already has notched several records: It was the first private entity to place a satellite into Earth’s orbit; the first to land and then reuse major parts of returning rockets; and the first to send spacecraft without humans to link up with the orbiting international laboratory.
After investing a total of more than $7 billion of taxpayer money so far in SpaceX and Boeing efforts to resume astronaut liftoffs from U.S. soil, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine sees a successful launch as recasting the path for America, other nations and industry to reach space. U.S. astronauts “need to have the capability of accessing space, not just for NASA but for all of humanity,” he said this month.
Roughly $3 billion of NASA’s total investment so far in such commercial space taxis has gone to support SpaceX’s work, based on agency documents and space experts’ estimates. Mr. Musk’s company, which hasn’t publicly released details of its own spending, will be paid a fixed price for each astronaut sent into orbit. Separately, experts have estimated SpaceX has invested nearly $1 billion to develop a heavy-lift booster.
By encouraging private investments in such ventures, academics and industry officials said, NASA is increasing the likelihood of getting humans to the moon quickly and establishing a longer-term presence there, instead of depending entirely on federal support.
Traditional government funding strategies, by themselves, won’t be adequate to support U.S. space ambitions, said Howard McCurdy, a space historian at American University. “The [older] financial options certainly aren’t viable; they aren’t going to do it on a Project Apollo model.”
But even a trouble-free demonstration flight isn’t likely to usher in a booming era of smaller, inexpensive rockets—something Mr. Musk and other commercial-space champions once considered inevitable.
“Elon Musk opened the door to making space deals acceptable,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology.
Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have spawned scores of such startups world-wide. But even before the pandemic, only a handful of the new generation of rocket companies appeared to be gaining significant traction. Now, the contagion is creating formidable additional hurdles. With a few prominent exceptions—including Rocket Lab of New Zealand and Blue Origin LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos—the specter of the virus has eroded financing and marketing prospects for many proposed projects.
Virgin Orbit, a small-satellite launch provider founded by Richard Branson, suffered a catastrophic rocket failure seconds into its maiden flight last weekend.
Many SpaceX operations facilities have remained at least partly staffed, in contrast to the recent turmoil surrounding Mr. Musks’s moves to restart production at the Northern California factory of electric-car company, Tesla Inc., in defiance of local authorities.
The safety of the Dragon capsule and its crew depend on a host of complex, interrelated features—from autonomous docking to life-support systems—working in precise sequence on the first try, Mr. McCurdy said. The Russian space agency has achieved a formidable safety record carrying people to space, thanks to its long and steady history of launches.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, told reporters recently she never has to remind her employees about the importance of safety: “They remind themselves.”
Doug Hurley, a veteran NASA astronaut who flew on the final space-shuttle mission and is to be commander on the coming SpaceX launch, told Vice President Mike Pence and the rest of the White House space-policy group that the reality of what is about to happen has yet to sink in: “In some ways, it’s really hard to believe we’re going to launch.”
Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com