Spending a month at a historic ranch as its host and caretaker is not a dream vacation description, it’s a volunteer program offered by the U.S. Forest Service. The Hells River Volunteering Program allows anyone to spend a month at one of the most picturesque places in the country. The requirements are applying, stocking up on food and being ready to live without a cell phone. Lesia Bakalets traveled to Hells Canyon to talk with volunteers living at the ranch. Anna Rice narrates her story.
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Month: May 2019
An innovative Czech company is changing the way we think of light, by capturing and transforming it in ways that save money and generally make the world a more beautiful place. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Lightweight, cheap to make and easier to send into outer space. Academics in the U.S. are developing an inflatable robot with money from the American space agency, NASA. NASA says the blow-up technology can handle the cosmos and existence back here on Earth. Arash Arabasadi has more.
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Rivers are a source of irrigation, drinking water, recreation … and flooding. Scientists say the threat of flooding will increase as the climate changes. Here in the United States, scientists are preparing for that future with a variety of technology, including drones, supercomputers and sonar, to manage flood control projects and to try to predict and prevent floods. Faiza Elmasry has the story narrated by Faith Lapidus.
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Progressive Christian author Rachel Held Evans died in Tennessee Saturday after spending two weeks in a hospital for treatment for an infection and brain seizures. She was 37.
Sarah Bessey, a writer and friend of Evans’, says she died in Nashville early Saturday morning, surrounded by her husband and friends.
Bessey said Evans challenged the evangelical community by addressing sexism and racism and “championing voices of people who have been marginalized in the church,” including the LGBTQ community.
Evans was a resident of Dayton, Tennessee. Her books include “Faith Unraveled,” “A Year of Biblical Womanhood,” and “Searching for Sunday.” Evans’ website said she wrote about “faith, doubt and life in the Bible Belt.”
Evans served on former President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. She spoke at churches, conferences and universities around the country.
Dan Evans wrote on his wife’s blog April 19 that she was placed in a medically induced coma after her brain experienced seizures during treatment for an infection. Doctors tried to reduce swelling in her brain Friday but could not save her.
Bessey called her friend courageous, loving and passionate.
“I can’t imagine a world without her voice,” Bessey told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “She was leading in a space where a lot of people in the church were silent.”
Evans was the mother of two children. Funeral arrangements are pending.
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Maximum Security led all the way in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, only to become the first winner disqualified for interference in the race’s 145-year history. After a long wait, long shot Country House was declared the winner
Country House, a 65-1 shot, finished second in the slop before an objection was raised, causing a lengthy delay while stewards repeatedly reviewed several angles of video footage.
The stunning outcome gave Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott his first Derby victory at age 65. Jockey Flavien Prat, who originated the claim of foul, also won his first Derby.
Country House paid $132.40 to win — the second-highest payout in Derby history.
It was a crushing turn of events for trainer Jason Servis and jockey Luis Saez, who already had begun celebrating what they thought were their first Derby victories.
Instead, Maximum Security was dropped to 17th of 19 horses. The colt was the 9-2 second choice in the wagering.
Prat claimed that Maximum Security ducked out in the final turn and forced several horses to steady.
War of Will came perilously close to clipping heels with Maximum Security, which could have caused a chain-reaction accident.
The stewards reviewed race footage for nearly 20 minutes while keeping the crowd of 150,729 in suspense, clutching betting tickets. Trainers and jockeys involved stared at the closest video screen waiting for a result.
Code of Honor was moved up to second and Tacitus was third.
Improbable was fourth and Game Winner fifth, two of trainer Bob Baffert’s trio of entries.
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The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says the outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo is “worsening” and has killed more than 1,000 people.
IFRC said Saturday that in the past week, 23 cases were reported in one day, a record number since the start of the outbreak in 2018.
The DRC health ministry said Friday the Ebola death toll has risen to 1,008.
Violence helps cases spike
Violence has complicated efforts to contain the second most deadly Ebola virus outbreak in history, as the number of new cases increases each time treatment and prevention work is disrupted.
Many people are afraid to go to Ebola treatment centers because of the violence. They may instead choose to stay home where they run the risk of infecting their caretakers and neighbors.
“We are at a critical juncture where we need to step up our support to communities that are facing greater risk of infection, yet Ebola responders face massive security challenges and a lack of resources for the response,” said Nicole Fassina, IFRC Ebola Virus Disease Coordinator. “An under-resourced operation creates a very real risk of an international spread of Ebola,” she added.
“We are dealing with a difficult and volatile situation,” said Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s executive director of emergencies program. “We are anticipating a scenario of continued, intense transmission.”
Insecurity has become a “major impediment,” Ryan said.
The most deadly Ebola outbreak occurred in West Africa in 2014. More than 11,000 people had been killed by 2016.
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New party animals in Los Angeles are literally, well, animals. Parties with dwarf goats are quickly gaining popularity in the City of Angels. Angelina Bagdasaryan crashed one such party to see what it is like to hang out with goats. Anna Rice narrates her story.
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It’s very unlikely that anyone would willingly walk into a bar named the KGB, but writers and book lovers in New York do it all the time. Iuliia Iarmolenko visited what is actually a lively literary venue and talked to its owner about its peculiar history. Anna Rice narrates her story.
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Scientists are conducting a large-scale, underwater experiment in the North Sea, testing for carbon dioxide leaks in what they say is world first. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports the researchers are testing a plan to pump some of the world’s excess carbon into depleted underwater wells.
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European and American investigators have broken up one of the world’s largest online criminal marketplaces for drugs, hacking tools and financial-theft wares in raids in the United States, Germany and Brazil.
Three German men, ages 31, 22 and 29, were arrested after the raids in three southern states on allegations they operated the so-called “Wall Street Market” darknet platform, which hosted about 5,400 sellers and more than 1 million customer accounts, Frankfurt prosecutor Georg Ungefuk told reporters in Wiesbaden on Friday.
A Brazilian man, the site’s alleged moderator, was also charged.
The three Germans, identified in U.S. court documents as Tibo Lousee, Jonathan Kalla and Klaus-Martin Frost, face drug charges in Germany on allegations they administrated the platform where cocaine, heroin and other drugs, as well as forged documents and other illegal material, were sold.
They have also been charged in the United States with conspiring to launder money and distribute illegal drugs, according to a criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court.
“The charges filed in Germany and the United States will significantly disrupt the illegal sale of drugs on the darknet,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan White told reporters in Germany. “We believe that Wall Street Market recently became the world’s largest darknet marketplace for contraband including narcotics, hacking tools, illegal services and stolen financial data.”
Two-year operation
Ungefuk said Wall Street Market was at least the second biggest, refusing to name others for fear of jeopardizing other investigations.
In the nearly two-year operation involving European police agency Europol and authorities in the Netherlands as well as the U.S. and Germany, investigators pinpointed the three men as administrators of the platform on the darknet. It is part of the internet often used by criminals that is hosted within an encrypted network and accessible only through anonymity-providing tools, such as the Tor browser.
Transactions were conducted using cryptocurrencies, and the suspects took commissions ranging from 2% to 6%, Ungefuk said.
The site trafficked documents such as identity papers and driver’s licenses. But an estimated 60% or more of the business was drug-related, he said.
Caught during ‘exit scam’
Authorities swept in quickly after the platform was switched into a “maintenance mode” April 23, and the suspects allegedly began transferring funds used on the platform to themselves in a so-called “exit scam,” Ungefuk said.
The U.S. Department of Justice said the administrators took about $11 million in the exit scam from escrow and user accounts.
The U.S. identified a fourth defendant as Marcos Paulo De Oliveira-Annibale, 29, of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was not clear if he had been arrested, and federal police in Brazil wouldn’t comment.
Annibale, who went by the moniker “MED3LIN” online, faces federal drug distribution and money laundering charges in the United States for allegedly acting as a moderator on the site in disputes between vendors and their customers. He also allegedly promoted Wall Street Market on prominent websites such as Reddit, the Justice Department said.
Brazilian authorities searched his home Thursday after investigators linked his online persona to pictures he posted of himself years ago, U.S. officials said.
Impact will be short-lived
A University of Manchester criminology researcher who follows activity on dark web markets, Patrick Shortis, said the takedown was widely anticipated after Annibale leaked his credentials and the market’s true internet address online.
Knocking out Wall Street Market is unlikely to have a lasting impact on online criminal markets, though law enforcement officials make it clear they are going after sellers and customers, Shortis said.
In Los Angeles, two drug suppliers were arrested, and authorities confiscated about $1 million cash, weapons and drugs in raids. They were only identified by their online monikers, “Platinum45” and “Ladyskywalker,” and characterized as “major drug traffickers” dealing methamphetamine and fentanyl.
Other darknet busts
After the first big takedown of such a marketplace, Silk Road in 2013, it took overall trade about four to five months to recuperate, Shortis said. And after law enforcement took out Hansa and AlphaBay in 2017, it took about a month, he said.
Shortis said one threat he does see to the market, in the short term at least, are so-called denial of service cyberattacks that effectively knock web servers offline by flooding them with traffic.
“An extortionist is currently targeting Empire and Nightmare, who are both in the running to replace Wall Street as the top market,” he said.
The raids in Germany culminated Thursday with the seizure of servers, while federal police confiscated 550,000 euros ($615,000) in cash, Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrencies, hard drives, and other evidence in multiple raids.
Because of the clandestine nature of the operation and the difficulty of tracing cryptocurrencies, Ungefuk said it was difficult to assess the overall volume of business conducted by the darknet group. But he said that “we’re talking about profits in the millions at least.”
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Guatemala’s subsistence farmers and indigenous people living in poor rural
communities are most affected by rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall linked to climate change, a leading researcher said Friday.
Poverty makes the Central American country highly vulnerable to the impact of global warming that damages harvests and causes food shortages, said Edwin Castellanos, lead author of a report by the Guatemalan System of Climate Change Sciences (SGCCC).
Guatemala could see a rise of 3 to 6 degrees Celsius by 2100 and a drop of 10 to 30 percent in rainfall if countries such as China, India and the United States do not cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to the SGCCC.
Nearly 200 countries agreed in 2015 to curbing greenhouse emissions enough to keep the global hike in temperatures “well below” 2 C above pre-industrial times while pursuing a tougher 1.5 C ceiling.
Carbon dioxide and methane are the main greenhouse gases that trap heat and contribute to climate change.
“Guatemala is very vulnerable due to its high levels of poverty,” said Castellanos, who is dean of the Research Institute at Guatemala’s Valle University and a leading expert in climate change in Central America.
“Changes in weather exacerbate and worsen the situation, especially among the poorest populations,” he said.
Chronic malnutrition
Seven in every 10 farming families live in poverty, and nearly half of all children under age 5 have chronic malnutrition, according to a report this week by the SGCCC, a group of universities, researchers and government agencies.
About half of Guatemala’s population of 17 million is indigenous, many of them subsistence bean and maize farmers.
“It will depend a lot on what developed countries do to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions,” Castellanos told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Rainfall in Guatemala is becoming more unpredictable, resulting in crop losses, he said.
“The rainy season is starting later,” he said. “When it does start to rain, the rains are very intense.”
Guatemala is located in a wet, tropical area but poor management has caused major water shortages in many areas, he said.
Also, over the past four decades, the average temperature in Guatemala has risen already by at least 1 degree Celsius, according to the SGCCC.
In 2013, Guatemala passed a law requiring all government agencies to draw up plans to combat climate change, but it lacks the resources and funding to effect major change, he said.
Guatemala’s agriculture ministry has started helping small farmers set up irrigation systems to cope with drought, but only about a thousand irrigation systems are being built a year when millions of families are in need, he said.
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Democratic presidential hopeful Jay Inslee, as part of his pledge to make combating climate change the top national priority, is calling for the nation’s entire electrical grid and all new vehicles and buildings to be carbon pollution free by 2030.
It’s the first major policy proposal from the Washington governor as he tries to gain a foothold in a field of more than 20 candidates.
The plan, the first piece of a series of climate action proposals from Inslee, would represent a national shift from coal-powered plants and traditional fuel engines in vehicles, while requiring an overhaul in the way most buildings are heated and cooled. Inslee’s outline would require legislation and executive action, some of it similar to what Inslee has pushed during his six-plus years as governor, but on a scale not seen at the federal level.
Inslee, who announced his campaign in March, has not yet attached a public or private cost estimate for a wide-ranging approach that would involve some direct federal spending, tax subsidies, and outlays by utilities and the private sector. He argues that doing nothing would cost more and that investments in clean energy will create millions of jobs to spur the economy, with that developing market and targeted government programs ensuring a stable transition for existing coal workers.
Worthy of “can-do nation”
This is the approach that is worthy of the ambitions of a can-do nation and answers the absolute necessity of action that is defined by science,'' Inslee told The Associated Press, adding that President Donald Trump's denial of climate change willdoom us” to a stagnant or declining economy repeatedly hammered with natural disasters.
“We are already paying through the nose” through increased insurance rates and federal disaster declarations, he said. ”And there’s a heckuva lot more jobs defeating climate change than there are in denying it.”
Trump has called climate change a Chinese hoax,'' and he used a cold snap that hit much of the nation in January to again cast doubts, tweeting,People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming (sic)? Please come back fast, we need you!” But the Pentagon and the Republican president’s intelligence team have mentioned climate change as a national security threat.
Inslee pitched his proposal Friday in Los Angeles at the city’s new clean-energy bus depot.
He emphasizes that many U.S. cities and states already have set ambitious timelines for carbon emissions reductions but that there must be national action. Washington state this spring passed a law requiring that all power produced in the state be zero-emission by 2045; California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Puerto Rico have adopted similar requirements.
Inslee’s appearance with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who considered a presidential bid, came days after former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who’s also running for president, went to Yosemite National Park to announce his own climate action plan that he says would require $5 trillion of public and private spending to put the economy on track to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Longtime advocate
Climate change has garnered more attention in the early months of the 2020 nominating fight than it did four years ago, but Inslee noted that he’s still the lone major candidate making climate action the centerpiece of a campaign, and he touted his decades of climate advocacy as a member of Congress and as governor.
Inslee, 68, said climate action “has been a lifetime passion for me.”
Some highlights of Inslee’s proposal:
— Utilities would be required to achieve 100% carbon neutral electricity production by 2030 and reach zero-emission production by 2035. Inslee proposes refundable tax credits to help spur the development, and his plan calls for “guaranteeing support” for existing energy sector workers who lose jobs or otherwise are negatively affected in a transition to clean energy.
— All light-duty passenger vehicles, medium-duty trucks and buses would be required to be zero-emission by 2030. Vehicles already in service would be exempted, though a “Clean Cars for Clunkers” program would provide rebates when consumers trade old vehicles for new, zero-emission models. The plan would expand business and individual tax credits to encourage production and purchase of zero-emission vehicles.
— A national Zero-Carbon Building Standard would be created by 2023, helping states and cities redevelop their own building codes for residential and commercial construction. Tax incentives for builders and buyers would be used to encourage energy-efficient heating and cooling systems in construction.
— All federal agencies would be brought under the 2030 timeline. That includes everything from making the government’s vehicle fleet zero-emission to using federal lands and property, including offshore waters, to capture and distribute more wind and solar power.
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Cybersecurity officials from dozens of countries on Friday proposed a set of principles to ensure the safety of next generation mobile networks amid concerns over the use of gear made by China’s Huawei.
The non-binding proposals were published at the end of a two-day meeting in Prague to discuss the security of new 5G networks.
The U.S. has been lobbying allies to ban Huawei from 5G networks over concerns China’s government could force the company to give it access to data for cyberespionage. Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of telecom infrastructure equipment, has denied the allegations.
The proposals reflected security concerns, with some wording that also appeared to be aimed at raising the bar for Chinese suppliers. The document said “security and risk assessment of vendors and network technologies” should be taken into account, as well as “the overall risk of influence on a supplier by a third country,” especially its “model of governance.”
“Security and risk assessments of vendors and network technologies should take into account rule of law,” it said.
U.S. officials have urged their allies to take into account the laws and legal system of a country where a 5G supplier is based, saying that China’s lack of independent judiciary means companies have no legal options if they don’t want to comply with Beijing’s orders.
The European Commission has also recommended that EU countries factor in the legal systems of the countries where 5G suppliers are headquartered.
At the meeting in Prague, the cybersecurity officials came mainly from countries that are strategic allies, including European Union member states, the United States and its Asia-Pacific allies including Australia, Japan and South Korea and Singapore. NATO and European Union officials also participated but China and Russia were not present.
Europe has become a key battleground in the war over whether to ban Huawei, with countries gearing up to deploy the new networks, starting with the auction of radio frequencies this year.
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U.S. employers added a robust 263,000 jobs in April, suggesting that businesses have shrugged off earlier concerns that the economy might slow this year and anticipate strong customer demand.
The unemployment rate fell to a five-decade low of 3.6% from 3.8%, though that drop partly reflected an increase in the number of Americans who stopped looking for work. Average hourly pay rose 3.2% from 12 months earlier, a healthy increase though unchanged from the previous month.
Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department showed that solid economic growth is still encouraging strong hiring nearly a decade into the economy’s recovery from the Great Recession. The economic expansion is set to become the longest in history in July.
Many businesses say they are struggling to find workers. Some have taken a range of steps to fill jobs, including training more entry-level workers, loosening educational requirements and raising pay.
The brightening picture represents a sharp improvement from the start of the year. At the time, the government was enduring a partial shutdown, the stock market had plunged, trade tensions between the United States and China were flaring and the Federal Reserve had just raised short-term interest rates in December for a fourth time in 2018. Analysts worried that the economy might barely expand in the first three months of the year.
Yet the outlook soon brightened. Chair Jerome Powell signaled that the Fed would put rate hikes on hold. Trade negotiations between the U.S. and China made some progress. The economic outlook in some other major economies improved. Share prices rebounded.
And in the end, the government reported that the U.S. economy grew at a 3.2% annual rate in the January-March period — the strongest pace for a first quarter since 2015. That said, the growth was led mostly by factors that could prove temporary — a restocking of inventories in warehouses and on store shelves and a narrowing of the U.S. trade deficit. By contrast, consumer spending and business investment, which more closely reflect the economy’s underlying strength, were relatively weak.
Yet American households have become more confident since the winter and are ramping up their spending. Consumer spending surged in March by the most in nearly a decade. A likely factor is that steady job growth and solid wage increases have enlarged Americans’ paychecks.
Businesses are also spending more freely. Orders to U.S. factories for long-lasting capital goods jumped in March by the most in eight months. That suggested that companies were buying more computers, machinery and other equipment to keep up with growing customer demand.
Housing, too, is rebounding after home sales had slumped in the second half of last year. Mortgage rates rose to nearly 5% last fall as the Fed raised interest rates. With the Fed now putting rate hikes on hold, borrowing costs have declined.
In February, sales of existing homes jumped by the most in three years. And in March, more Americans signed contracts to buy a house. Contract signings usually lead to finished sales one to two months later.
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Vietnam is used to being an order taker. Companies such as Nokia and Samsung Electronics use the Southeast Asian country’s cheap labor to assemble consumer electronics for export. Those investments from abroad have slowly handed Vietnam the supplies, parts and know-how needed for local companies to make their own smartphones.
In a bellwether case, a unit of the Vingroup property and retail conglomerate began selling phones in December with plans to join a Spanish technology firm in escalating production over the next two years, according to domestic media reports.
Vingroup should expect a stronger than ever onshore supply chain plus abundant labor, analysts in Vietnam say, but must appeal better than its predecessors, mostly written off as failures, to the domestic market where shoppers tend to prefer foreign brands.
“I would say that there’s more and more bits and pieces that are being produced in Vietnam as the Taiwanese and Koreans and everybody else moves their parts supply here,” said Frederick Burke, partner with the law firm Baker McKenzie in Ho Chi Minh City.
Brisk sales of a locally made phone would push Vietnam’s low-wage, contract-reliant economy up the value chain.
Qphones out, Bphones in
Vietnamese developers have launched a handful of mobile phones over the past decade under brands such as Qphone and Mobiistar. A lot have faded or folded because of poor marketing or lack of knowledge about what consumers want, said Thanh Vo, senior analyst with the market research firm IDC Indochina in Ho Chi Minh City.
In 2015, handset builder and software firm BKAV Corp. came out with what consumers and analysts describe as Vietnam’s first qualified success.
BKAV’s first devices, the Bphone and Bphone 2, got poor reviews, domestic news website VietNamNet Bridge said in a report in October. But its $314 Bphone 3 released last year won praise among experts for its processing speed and water resistance “contrary to all predictions,” the report said.
Vinsmart signed an agreement in July with BQ of Spain to launch four smartphones under the Vsmart brand in December, the Vietnam Investment Review reported. Vingroup, which is run by Vietnam’s richest person Pham Nhat Vuong, plans to make up to 5 million handsets a year by 2021, the Financial Times reported.
Vingroup did not answer a request for comment for this report.
Nation of factories
Foreign investment in Vietnamese manufacturing is fueling economic growth of 6% to 7% every year. The GDP rose nearly 7.1% in 2018, the highest in 11 years. Among the engines, Samsung, LG Electronics, Nokia and Intel are all making “multibillion-dollar investments” in Vietnam, business consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates says. Exports of electronics had exceeded $40 billion by 2017.
Five years ago, just 2% of the value added to made-in-Vietnam electronics was local, Burke said. That percentage, he said, is higher now. The Vsmart phones will probably still use parts from offshore, he said, but find a solid local supply chain as well.
The Bphone 3s run on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors and use Gorilla Glass covers by Corning. Both suppliers are American.
Labor for domestic phones will be intensely local, Vo said.
“From my experience, Vingroup will pay the high salaries to recruit the human resources from other competitors,” he said.
Hesitant consumers
Economic growth will help expand the middle class to about one-third of Vietnam’s 96 million people by next year, the Boston Consulting Group estimates. Some of that new wealth in the country where just about everyone, including fishermen and garbage collectors, carries a smartphone has gone toward high-end phones by Apple and Samsung.
“I am not interested in Vietnamese phones, since the Bphone was unveiled a few years ago, and the quality is not good,” said Phuong Hong, a 10-year iPhone user in Ho Chi Minh City.
But consumers who normally buy relatively cheap handsets made by Chinese firms such as Oppo and Huawei might consider a local brand in the same price range, Burke said.
Because consumers normally pick smartphones for their design and price rather than country of origin, Vietnamese vendors must step up their marketing and figure out before production what domestic shoppers want, Vo said. Vietnamese are looking for phones as cheap as $200, he added.
“We’ve seen many people try and many people fail, so one has to take a view on whether Vietnamese really want to buy a Vinsmart phone rather than a Samsung phone or an Apple phone, for example,” said Kevin Snowball, chief executive officer with PXP Vietnam Asset Management in Ho Chi Minh City.
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Nearly two weeks after a fiery explosion during a ground test of its new crew capsule, SpaceX confirmed Thursday that the vehicle was destroyed, but neither the company nor NASA, its primary customer, have publicly acknowledged the nature of the mishap.
Instead, Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability for California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, continued to refer to the accident simply as an “anomaly,” jargon for when something goes wrong.
The April 20 accident occurred at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as SpaceX was about to test eight emergency thrusters designed to propel the capsule, dubbed Crew Dragon, to safety from atop the rocket in the event of a launch failure.
“Just prior, before we wanted to fire the (thrusters), there was an anomaly and the vehicle was destroyed,” Koenigsmann told reporters Thursday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “There were no injuries. SpaceX had taken all safety measures prior to this test, as we always do.”
The news conference was called ahead of Friday’s scheduled launch of an unmanned resupply mission to the International Space Station using a cargo-only capsule built by SpaceX, the private rocket venture of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
When pressed about the accident, Koenigsmann declined to say whether an explosion or fire was involved. NASA has likewise declined to describe the mishap.
A leaked video of the accident, which a NASA contractor has acknowledged as authentic in an internal memo obtained by the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, showed the capsule blasting to smithereens. A pall of smoke was also widely observed from a distance at the time of the ill-fated test.
SpaceX’s reluctance to describe in plain terms what happened to the capsule was at odds with NASA’s long history of transparency surrounding accidents involving its human spaceflight program.
The Crew Dragon had been scheduled to carry U.S. astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station in a test mission in July, although April’s accident, as well as some vehicle design hitches, are likely to push that launch to later in the year or into 2020.
“It’s certainly not great news for the schedule overall, but I hope we can recover,” Koenigsmann said.
The destroyed vehicle was one of six such capsules built or in late production by SpaceX, and the first flown into space. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched it without crew to the space station in March for a six-day visit before returning to Earth, splashing down safely in the Atlantic for retrieval.
Koenigsmann said initial data from the accident showed the mishap occurred during activation of the emergency thrusters, which SpaceX calls the SuperDraco system.
“We have no reason to believe there is an issue with the SuperDracos themselves,” Koenigsmann said, adding that the engines have been tested nearly 600 times in the past.
NASA has been awarded $6.8 billion to SpaceX and rival Boeing Co to develop separate capsule systems to fly astronauts to space, but both companies have faced technical challenges and delays.
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National parks traveler Mikah Meyer just completed a three-year, record-setting journey visiting every National Park Service site in America. That’s 419 sites — from parks, canyons and prairies, to oceans, Civil War battlefields, and Native American territories. VOA’s Julie Taboh, who followed many of Mikah’s adventures, was there as he visited the very last site on his list, at the top of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C.
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