Month: September 2024

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day trip that lifted them higher than anyone has traveled since NASA’s moonwalkers.

SpaceX’s capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the predawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.

They pulled off the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 740 kilometers above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 1,408 kilometers following Tuesday’s liftoff.

Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union scored the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks were done by professional astronauts.

“We are mission complete,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, awaiting the recovery team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, pumping their fists with joy as they emerged onto the ship’s deck.

It was the first time SpaceX aimed for a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of islands 113 kilometers west of Key West. To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees brought a big, green turtle balloon to Mission Control at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually targets closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.

During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open barely a half-hour. Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s brand-new spacesuit followed by Gillis, who was knee-high as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also held a performance in orbit earlier in the week.

The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than those at the International Space Station. Most of that time was needed to depressurize the entire capsule and then restore the cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, wore spacesuits.

SpaceX considers the brief exercise a starting point to test spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.

This was Isaacman’s second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more still ahead under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, taking along contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

For the just completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card-processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won’t divulge how much he spent. 
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JOHANNESBURG — Thethiwe Mahlangu woke early on a chilly morning and walked through her busy South African township, where minibuses hooted to pick up commuters and smoke from sidewalk breakfast stalls hung in the air.

Her eyes had been troubling her. But instead of going to her nearby health clinic, Mahlangu was headed to the train station for an unusual form of care.

A passenger train known as Phelophepa — or “good, clean, health” in the Sesotho language — had been transformed into a mobile health facility. It circulates throughout South Africa for much of the year, providing medical attention to the sick, young and old who often struggle to receive the care they need at crowded local clinics.

For the past 30 years — ever since South Africa’s break with the former racist system of apartheid — the train has carried doctors, nurses and optometrists on an annual journey that touches even the most rural villages, delivering primary health care to about 375,000 people a year.

The free care it delivers is in contrast to South Africa’s overstretched public health care system on which about 84% of people rely.

Health care reflects the deep inequality of the country at large. Just 16% of South Africans are covered by health insurance plans that are beyond the financial reach of many in a nation with unemployment of over 32%.

Earlier this year, the government began to address that gap. President Cyril Ramaphosa in May signed into law the National Health Insurance Act, which aims to provide funding so that millions of South Africans without health insurance can receive care from the better-provisioned private sector.

But the law has been divisive. The government has not said how much it will cost and where the money will come from. Economists say the government will have to raise taxes. Critics say the country can’t afford it and warn that the system — yet to be implemented — will be open to abuse by corrupt officials and businessmen. They say the government should fix the public health care system instead.

For Mahlangu and others who look to the train for a rare source of free treatment, the situation at local health clinics is one of despair.

Long lines, shortages of medicines and rude nurses are some of the challenges at the clinics that cater for thousands of patients a day in Tembisa, east of Johannesburg.

“There we are not treated well,” Mahlangu said. “We are made to sit in the sun for long periods. You can sit there from 7 a.m. until around 4 p.m. when the clinic closes. When you ask, they say we must go ask the president to build us a bigger hospital.”

The health train has grown from a single three-carriage operation over the years to two 16-carriage trains. They are run by the Transnet Foundation, a social responsibility arm of Transnet, the state-owned railway company.

When the train began in 1994, many Black people in South Africa still lived in rural villages with little access to health facilities. It was a period of change in the country. The train began as an eye clinic, but it soon became clear that needs were greater than that.

Now both trains address the booming population of South Africa’s capital of Pretoria and nearby Johannesburg, the country’s economic hub. One would spend two weeks in Tembisa alone.

“The major metros are really struggling,” said Shemona Kendiah, the train’s manager.

But the traveling clinic is far from the solution to South Africa’s health care problems.

Public health expert Alex van den Heever said there have been substantial increases in the health care budget and the public sector employment of nurses and doctors since the country’s first democratic government in 1994. The health department’s budget in Gauteng province, which includes Pretoria and Johannesburg, has grown from 6 billion rand ($336 million) in 2000 to 65 billion ($3.6 billion) rand now.

But van den Heever accused the African National Congress, the ruling party since the end of apartheid, of allowing widespread corruption to undermine the public sector, including the health care system.

“This has led to a rapid deterioration of performance,” he said.

For South Africans who have witnessed the decline firsthand, it can be a relief when the health train pulls into town.

Mahlangu — with her new pair of glasses — was among hundreds who walked away satisfied with its services and already longing for the train’s return next year.

Another patient, Jane Mabuza, got a full health checkup along with dental services. She said she hoped the train would reach many other people.

“Here on the train, you never hear that anything has been finished,” she said.
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tokyo — A long robot entered a damaged reactor at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant on Tuesday, beginning a two-week, high-stakes mission to retrieve for the first time a tiny amount of melted fuel debris from the bottom.

The robot’s trip into the Unit 2 reactor is a crucial initial step for what comes next — a daunting, decades-long process to decommission the plant and deal with large amounts of highly radioactive melted fuel inside three reactors that were damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Specialists hope the robot will help them learn more about the status of the cores and the fuel debris.

Here is an explanation of how the robot works, its mission, significance and what lies ahead as the most challenging phase of the reactor cleanup begins.

What is the fuel debris?

Nuclear fuel in the reactor cores melted after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s cooling systems to fail. The melted fuel dripped down from the cores and mixed with internal reactor materials such as zirconium, stainless steel, electrical cables, broken grates and concrete around the supporting structure and at the bottom of the primary containment vessels.

The reactor meltdowns caused the highly radioactive, lava-like material to spatter in all directions, greatly complicating the cleanup. The condition of the debris also differs in each reactor.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, or TEPCO, which manages the plant, says an estimated 880 tons of molten fuel debris remains in the three reactors, but some experts say the amount could be larger.

What is the robot’s mission?

Workers will use five 1.5-meter-long pipes connected in sequence to maneuver the robot through an entry point in the Unit 2 reactor’s primary containment vessel. The robot itself can extend about 6 meters inside the vessel. Once inside, it will be maneuvered remotely by operators at another building at the plant because of the fatally high radiation emitted by the melted debris.

The front of the robot, equipped with tongs, a light and a camera, will be lowered by a cable to a mound of melted fuel debris. It will then snip off and collect a bit of the debris — less than 3 grams). The small amount is meant to minimize radiation dangers.

The robot will then back out to the place it entered the reactor, a roundtrip journey that will take about two weeks.

The mission takes that long because the robot must make extremely precise maneuvers to avoid hitting obstacles or getting stuck in passageways. That has happened to earlier robots.

TEPCO is also limiting daily operations to two hours to minimize the radiation risk for workers in the reactor building. Eight six-member teams will take turns, with each group allowed to stay maximum of about 15 minutes.

What do officials hope to learn?

Sampling the melted fuel debris is “an important first step,” said Lake Barrett, who led the cleanup after the 1979 disaster at the U.S. Three Mile Island nuclear plant for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is now a paid adviser for TEPCO’s Fukushima decommissioning.

While the melted fuel debris has been kept cool and has stabilized, the aging of the reactors poses potential safety risks, and the melted fuel needs to be removed and relocated to a safer place for long-term storage as soon as possible, experts say.

An understanding of the melted fuel debris is essential to determine how best to remove it, store it and dispose of it, according to the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.

Experts expect the sample will also provide more clues about how exactly the meltdown 13 years ago played out, some of which is still a mystery.

The melted fuel sample will be kept in secure canisters and sent to multiple laboratories for more detailed analysis. If the radiation level exceeds a set limit, the robot will take the sample back into the reactor.

“It’s the start of a process. It’s a long, long road ahead,” Barrett said in an online interview. “The goal is to remove the highly radioactive material, put it into engineered canisters … and put those in storage.”

For this mission, the robot’s small tong can only reach the upper surface of the debris. The pace of the work is expected to pick up in the future as more experience is gained and robots with additional capabilities are developed.

What’s next?

TEPCO will have to “probe down into the debris pile, which is over a meter thick, so you have to go down and see what’s inside,” Barrett said, noting that at Three Mile Island, the debris on the surface was very different from the material deeper inside. He said multiple samples from different locations must be collected and analyzed to better understand the melted debris and develop necessary equipment, such as stronger robots for future larger-scale removal.

Compared to collecting a tiny sample for analysis, it will be a more difficult challenge to develop and operate robots that can cut larger chunks of melted debris into pieces and put that material into canisters for safe storage.

There are also two other damaged reactors, Unit 1 and Unit 3, which are in worse condition and will take even longer to deal with. TEPCO plans to deploy a set of small drones in Unit 1 for a probe later this year and is developing even smaller “micro” drones for Unit 3, which is filled with a larger amount of water.

Separately, hundreds of spent fuel rods remain in unenclosed cooling pools on the top floor of both Unit 1 and 2. This is a potential safety risk if there’s another major quake. Removal of spent fuel rods has been completed at Unit 3.

When will the decommissioning be finished?

Removal of the melted fuel was initially planned to start in late 2021 but has been delayed by technical issues, underscoring the difficulty of the process. The government says decommissioning is expected to take 30-40 years, while some experts say it could take as long as 100 years.

Others are pushing for an entombment of the plant, as at Chernobyl after its 1986 explosion, to reduce radiation levels and risks for plant workers.

That won’t work at the seaside Fukushima plant, Barrett says.

“You’re in a high seismic area, you’re in a high-water area, and there are a lot of unknowns in those (reactor) buildings,” he said. “I don’t think you can just entomb it and wait.”
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Geneva, Switzerland — Limited capacity is keeping mpox testing coverage low in the DR Congo — the epicenter of the international emergency — the World Health Organization said Saturday in its latest situation report. 

“Testing coverage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains low, due to limited testing capacity,” the United Nations health agency said in its update. 

It said the mpox case fatality ratio in the DRC in 2024 was 0.5% among confirmed cases — or 25 deaths from 5,160 cases — and 3.3% among suspected cases, both tested and untested — or 717 deaths among 21,835 cases. 

“Due to limited access to laboratory testing in remote areas, only about 40% of all suspected cases have been tested in 2024 (up from 9% in 2023), and among these, around 55% tested positive,” the WHO said. 

It said the three countries reporting the most suspected cases in the year up to September 8 were the DRC, followed by Burundi (1,489 suspected cases, no deaths), and Nigeria (935 suspected cases, no deaths). 

There are two clades of mpox, each with a and b subclades. 

The WHO said the clades and their subclades were circulating in different geographic areas and were affecting different populations — and therefore needed “tailored and locally adapted outbreak responses.” 

The WHO declared an international emergency over mpox on August 14, concerned by the surge in cases of the new Clade 1b strain in the DRC that spread to nearby countries. 

In the DRC, Clade 1b has been detected chiefly in the eastern South Kivu and North Kivu provinces, with additional cases in the Kinshasa capital province. 

Current sequencing capacity in the DRC “is limited, and clade distribution might be broader than what is currently known” the WHO said. 

Clade 1b has also been detected in the DRC’s eastern neighbors Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, plus Kenya. Additionally, a single case has been detected in Sweden and another in Thailand. 

Looking at global vaccine availability, the WHO said more than 3.6 million doses had been pledged for the global response, including more than 620,000 doses of the MVA-BN vaccine by European countries, the United States and manufacturer Bavarian Nordic. 

Meanwhile Japan has pledged 3 million doses of the LC16 vaccine. 

To date, 265,000 MVA-BN doses have been delivered to Kinshasa, while 10,000 have gone to Nigeria. 
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brasilia — In a visit to see the damage caused by drought and fire in the Amazon, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pledged to pave a road that environmentalists and some in his own government say threatens to vastly increase destruction of the world’s largest tropical forest — and contribute to climate change. 

The BR-319 roadway is a mostly dirt road through the rainforest that connects the states of Amazonas and Roraima to the rest of the country. It ends in Manaus, the Amazon’s largest city with over 2 million people, and runs parallel to the Madeira River, a major tributary of the Amazon River. The Madeira is at its lowest recorded level, disrupting cargo navigation, with most of its riverbed now endless sand dunes under a sky thick with smoke. 

“We are aware that, while the river was navigable and full, the highway didn’t have the importance it has now, while the Madeira River was alive. We can’t leave two capitals isolated. But we will do it with the utmost responsibility,” Lula said Tuesday during a visit to an Indigenous community in Manaquiri, in Amazonas state. He didn’t specify what steps the government would take to try to prevent deforestation from increasing after paving. 

Hours later, he oversaw the signing of a contract to pave 52 kilometers (32 miles) of the road, and promised to begin work before his term ends in 2026 on the most controversial section of the road — a 400-kilometer (249-mile) stretch through old-growth forest. 

A permit for the longer stretch was issued under Lula’s far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who favored development in the Amazon and weakened environmental protections. In July, a federal court suspended the permit in a lawsuit brought by the Climate Observatory, a network of 119 environmental, civil society and academic groups. 

Lula’s government had appealed the suspension, but it wasn’t until his visit on Tuesday that Lula made clear his plan to move ahead with paving. The Climate Observatory lamented the move. 

“Without the forest, there is no water, it’s interconnected,” said Suely Araujo, a public policy coordinator with the group. “The paving of the middle section of BR-319, without ensuring environmental governance and the presence of the government in the region, will lead to historic deforestation, as pointed out by many specialists and by Brazil’s federal environmental agency in the licensing process.” 

Lula has sought to portray himself as an environmental protector, and deforestation has slowed significantly since he took over for Bolsonaro. But he has also struck out at times against pressure from richer nations on preserving the Amazon, an invaluable resource for the planet in storing the carbon driving atmospheric warming, and did so again on Tuesday. 

“The world that buys our food is demanding that we preserve the Amazon,” he said. “And why? Because they want us to take care of the air they breathe. They didn’t preserve their own lands in the last century during the Industrial Revolution.” 

Brazil is enduring its worst drought ever recorded, with 59% of the country under stress — an area about half the size of the U.S. In the Amazon, rivers’ low levels have stranded hundreds of riverine communities, with shortage of potable water and food. Lula announced a wide distribution of water filters and other measures during his visit to the region. 

Meanwhile, most of Brazil has been under a thick layer of smoke from wildfires in the Amazon, affecting millions of people in faraway cities such as Sao Paulo, Brasilia and Curitiba and reaching as far south as Argentina and Paraguay. At Lula’s event, Environment Minister Marina Silva blamed the extreme drought brought by climate change for the widespread fires in a rainforest usually resistant to fire, calling it “a phenomenon we don’t even know how to handle.” 

Silva has been more cautious than Lula about paving the roadway. At a congressional hearing earlier, she called the Bolsonaro era’s permit a “sham” and praised the judicial ruling that suspended it. 

Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, contributing nearly 3% of global emissions, according to Climate Watch, an online platform managed by the World Resources Institute. Almost half these emissions stem from destruction of trees in the Amazon rainforest. 
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Taipei, Taiwan — The U.S.-China technology war is playing out in the smartphone market in China, where global rivals Apple and Huawei released new phones this week. Industry experts say Apple, which lacks home-field advantage, faces many challenges in defending its market share in the country.

The biggest highlight of the iPhone 16 is its artificial intelligence system, dubbed Apple Intelligence, while the Huawei Mate XT features innovative tri-fold screen technology.  But at a starting price of RMB 19,999, about $2,810, the Mate XT will cost about three times as much as the iPhone 16.

According to data from VMall, Huawei’s official shopping site, nearly 5.74 million people in China preordered the Mate XT as of late Thursday, 5½ days after Huawei began accepting preorders.

But in a survey conducted on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo by Radio France International, half of the 9,200 respondents said they would not purchase a Mate XT because the price is prohibitive. An additional 3,500 said they are not in the market for a new phone now.

“I suggest that Huawei release some products that ordinary people can afford,” a Weibo user wrote under the name “Diamond Man Yang Dong Feng.”

The iPhone 16 is not available for preorder until Friday, but some e-commerce vendors in China have promised to deliver the new devices to consumers within half a day to two days of sale.

In the competition between Apple and Huawei, iPhone 16 has some inherent disadvantages, said Shih-Fang Chiu, a senior industry analyst at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.

“Apple’s strength is information security and privacy, but this is difficult to achieve in the Chinese market, where the government can control the data in China’s market to a relatively high degree. In the era of AI mobile phones, this will bring challenges to Apple’s development in the Chinese market,” Chiu said.

Apple’s AI service on its iPhone 16 will roll out at a gradual pace in different languages, first in English and other languages later this year. The Chinese version will not be available until 2025.

There are other challenges Apple faces as well, Chiu added, such as regulatory controls, consumer sentiment favoring local brands and weakening spending power amid China’s economic slowdown.

According to Counterpoint Research’s statistics, Huawei held a market share of 15% in the second quarter of 2024, surpassing Apple’s 14% market share. That compares with Apple’s 17.3% share in 2023 as reported by the industry research firm International Data Corporation China, or IDC China.

Ryan Reith, the program vice president for IDC’s Mobile Device Tracker suite, said in a written response to VOA that the iPhone 16 has not made significant hardware upgrades and that AI applications alone are not attractive because consumers have GPT and other AI solutions.

AI applications are also another hurdle. Analyst Chih-Yen Tai said iPhone 16’s AI services involve personal data collection, information application and cloud computing, which will require collaboration with Chinese service providers.

That, along with the ban on Chinese civil servants and employees at state-owned enterprises from using their iPhone at work in recent years, will affect the sales of Apple products, said Tai, the deputy director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Evaluation at Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research in Taipei.

“China’s patriotism has led to a strong number of preorders” for Huawei’s tri-fold phones, Tai said.

“The competitors in China will sell the idea [to consumers] that iPhones will soon be edged out of the premium smartphone market. So, in the next stage, the affordable iPhone versions will be the key to whether it [Apple] can return to China or its previous glorious sales era,” Tai said.

Tzu-Ang Chen, a senior consultant in the digital technology industry in Taipei, said use of Huawei’s HarmonyOS operating system surpassed that of Apple’s iOS in China in the first quarter of this year, representing China’s determination to “go its own way” and create “one world, two systems.”

“The U.S.-China technology war has extended to smartphones,” Chen said. “IPhone sales in China will get worse and worse, obviously because Huawei is doing better, and coupled with patriotism, Apple’s position in the hearts of 1.4 billion people will never return.”

He said that as China seeks to develop pro-China markets among member countries of the Belt and Road Initiative in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, China-made mobile phones may become their first choice.

VOA’s Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A tech billionaire performed the first private spacewalk hundreds of kilometers above Earth on Thursday, a high-risk endeavor reserved for professional astronauts — until now.

Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman teamed up with SpaceX to test the company’s brand new spacesuits on his chartered flight. The daring spacewalk also saw SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis going out once Isaacman was safely back inside.

This spacewalk was simple and quick — less than two hours — compared with the drawn-out affairs conducted by NASA. Astronauts at the International Space Station often need to move across the sprawling complex for repairs, always traveling in pairs and lugging gear. Station spacewalks can last seven to eight hours.

Isaacman emerged first from the hatch, joining a small elite group of spacewalkers who until now had included only professional astronauts from a dozen countries.

“Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said as the capsule soared above the South Pacific. Cameras on board caught his silhouette, waist high at the hatch, with the blue Earth beneath.

The commercial spacewalk was the main focus of the five-day flight financed by Isaacman and Elon Musk’s company, and the culmination of years of development geared toward settling Mars and other planets.

All four on board donned the new spacewalking suits to protect themselves from the harsh vacuum. They launched on Tuesday from Florida, rocketing farther from Earth than anyone since NASA’s moonwalkers. The orbit was reduced by half — 740 kilometers — for the spacewalk.

This first spacewalking test involved more stretching than walking. Isaacman kept a hand or foot attached to it the whole time as he flexed his arms and legs to see how the new spacesuit held up. The hatch sported a walker-like structure for extra support.

After about 15 minutes outside, Isaacman was replaced by SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis to go through the same motions. Gillis bobbed up and down in weightlessness, no higher than her knees out of the capsule, as she twisted her arms and sent reports back to Mission Control.

Each had 3.6-meter tethers but did not unfurl them or dangle at the end unlike what happens at the space station, where astronauts routinely float out at a much lower orbit.

More and more wealthy passengers are plunking down huge sums for rides aboard private rockets to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. Other have spent tens of millions to stay in space for days or even weeks. Space experts and risk analysts say it’s inevitable that some will seek the thrill of spacewalking, deemed one of the most dangerous parts of spaceflight after launch and reentry but also the most soul-stirring.

This operation was planned down to the minute with little room for error. Trying out new spacesuits from a spacecraft new to spacewalking added to the risk. So did the fact that the entire capsule was exposed to the vacuum of space.

There were a few glitches. Isaacman had to manually pull the hatch open instead of pushing a button on board. Before heading out, Gillis reported seeing bulges in the hatch seal.

Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot, and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon stayed strapped to their seats to monitor from inside. All four underwent intensive training before the trip.

Isaacman, 41, CEO and founder of the Shift4 credit card-processing company, has declined to disclose how much he invested in the flight. It was the first of three flights in a program he’s dubbed Polaris; this one was called Polaris Dawn. For SpaceX’s inaugural private flight in 2021, he took up contest winners and a cancer survivor.

Until Thursday, only 263 people had conducted a spacewalk, representing 12 countries. The Soviet Union’s Alexei Leonov kicked it off in 1965, followed a few months later by NASA’s Ed White.
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