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Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are preparing for a Gulf of Mexico splashdown on Sunday in the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
The Crew Dragon capsule is completing maneuvers to bring the spacecraft out of orbit and splashdown in the sea under parachutes.
beautiful day for a splashdown from space
The first astronaut trip to orbit by a private company is coming to an end. The passengers are two NASA astronauts — Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley — but it could be a first step to more people going to space for a variety of new activities like sightseeing, corporate research and satellite repair.
This flight of the Crew Dragon capsule is being operated by SpaceX, the rocket company started by Elon Musk, as part of NASA’s efforts to turn over to private enterprise some things it used to do.
NASA has hired two companies — SpaceX and Boeing — to provide transportation of astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and SpaceX was the first to be ready to take astronauts to orbit, launching Mr. Behnken and Mr. Hurley in May.
After 63 days on the space station, Mr. Behnken and Mr. Hurley reboarded the Crew Dragon and undocked from the space station on Saturday evening.
The capsule and its passengers will land in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla., on Sunday. Splashdown is scheduled for 2:48 p.m. Eastern time. It will be the first water landing by NASA astronauts since 1975, when the agency’s crews were still flying to and from orbit in the Apollo modules used for the historic American moon missions.
SpaceX’s mission controllers told the astronauts that the spacecraft’s status, after a series of maneuvers to prepare it for landing, was “really good for entry, no health issues at this time.”
Earlier concerns about the Isaias storm system working its way up the Florida Atlantic coast prompted the selection of the Pensacola splashdown site. SpaceX officials on Sunday just before 2:30 p.m. described the weather around the landing zone as “very calm.”
Watch the return of the astronauts
NASA Television’s coverage will continue through splashdown. You can also watch it in the video player above. Video below shows the spacecraft’s departure from the space station on Saturday night.
What will happen as the spacecraft begins to land?
On Saturday, the Crew Dragon performed a series of thruster burns to move away from the space station and then line up with the splashdown site.
Before leaving orbit on Sunday, the spacecraft jettisoned its bottom half, known as the trunk, which will no longer be needed. That exposes the heat shield that protects the capsule and astronauts during re-entry.
“Oh yeah, we felt it,” Mr. Hurley said after the maneuver was confirmed on the ground.
One more thruster burn of about 11 minutes in length was completed after 2 p.m. Eastern time, which will cause the capsule to drop out of orbit, headed toward its landing site at sea.
Is it safer to land on water or on land?
Spacecraft can safely return to Earth in either environment.
During the 1960s and 1970s, NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules all splashed down in the ocean while Soviet capsules all ended their trips on land. Russia’s current Soyuz capsules continue to make ground landings, as do China’s astronaut-carrying Shenzhou capsules.
The last water landing by NASA astronauts occurred in July 1975 at the end of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, during which an American crew aboard an Apollo module docked in orbit with two Soviet astronauts aboard a Soyuz capsule.
While the crew splashed down safely, a problem with the Apollo spacecraft during re-entry caused fumes from rocket propellant to fill the capsule, causing breathing and eye problems for the astronauts.
When Boeing’s Starliner capsule begins carrying crews to the space station, it will return on land, in New Mexico. SpaceX had originally planned for the Crew Dragon to do ground landings, but decided that water landings, employed for the earlier version of Dragon for taking cargo, simplified the development of the capsule. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, further explained the reasoning on Twitter early on Sunday:
What do astronauts experience during a water landing?
Returning from the free-fall environment of orbit to the normal forces of gravity on Earth is often disorienting for astronauts. A water landing adds the possibility of seasickness.
During a news conference on Friday, Mr. Hurley said he had read some of the reports by the Skylab astronauts. “There was some challenges post splashdown,” he said. “Folks didn’t feel well, and you know, that is the way it is with a water landing, even if you’re not deconditioned like we’re going to be.”
Mr. Hurley acknowledged that vomiting would not be unexpected.
“There are bags if you need them, and we’ll have those handy,” he said. “We’ll probably have some towels handy as well. And you know, if that needs to happen, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that that’s happened in a space vehicle.”
What have the astronauts been doing since they undocked?
Sleeping mostly.
Following a series of thruster firings to put the spacecraft on track with the landing site, the astronauts’ schedule included a full night of rest. The capsule even completed one of its maneuvers while the astronauts are supposed to be sleeping.
Any return journey that exceeds six hours has to be long enough for the crew to get some sleep between undocking and splashdown, Daniel Huot, a NASA spokesman, said in an email.
Otherwise, because of the extended process that leads up to undocking, the crew would end up working more than 20 hours straight, “which is not safe for dynamic operations like water splashdown and recovery,” Mr. Huot said.
On Sunday morning, the astronauts were greeted with a wake up message sent from Earth by their two sons.
Just before noon, the astronauts began to put their SpaceX spacesuits back on as they completed preparations for landing.
Why is the return trip an important part of the Crew Dragon’s first flight?
After launch, re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere is the second most dangerous phase of spaceflight. Friction of air rushing past will heat the bottom of the capsule to about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. A test flight of the Crew Dragon last year successfully splashed down, so engineers know the system works.
A successful conclusion to the trip opens the door to more people flying to space. Some companies have already announced plans to use Crew Dragons to lift wealthy tourists to orbit.
In the past, NASA astronauts launched on spacecraft like the Saturn 5 moon rocket and the space shuttles that NASA itself operated. After the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011, NASA had to rely on Russia, buying seats on the Soyuz capsules for trips to and from orbit.
Who are the astronauts?
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.
Both men have backgrounds as military test pilots and each has flown twice before 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.
What have the astronauts been doing aboard the space station?
Originally, the mission was to last only up to two weeks, but Mr. Behnken and Mr. Hurley ended up with a longer and busier stay at the space station. Because of repeated delays by SpaceX and Boeing, NASA ended up short-handed, with only one astronaut, Christopher J. Cassidy, aboard the space station when the Crew Dragon and its two passengers docked.
They stayed two months, helping Mr. Cassidy with space station chores. Mr. Behnken and Mr. Cassidy performed four spacewalks to complete the installation of new batteries on the space station. Mr. Hurley helped by operating the station’s robotic arm.
Credit Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-nasa-return.html
President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the nation at 20h00 on Thursday evening 23 July 2020 on the risk-adjusted strategy to manage the spread of COVID-19
The goal of the system would have been to determine the location and movement of positive cases.
The national health department looked at the feasibility of a surveillance system that could track the movement of citizens to help it fight Covid-19, but it didn’t work out, a national official revealed to Western Cape MPLs.
“There was an attempt to develop a system to allow us to do that, however technical complexities and privacy concerns, and the protection of that, moved us towards active contact tracing,” said the department’s chief director of policy coordination and integrated planning Milani Wolmarans.
Wolmarans was briefing the Western Cape legislature’s ad hoc committee on Covid-19 on Friday.
The committee had been concerned about the privacy of individuals and whether their rights were being protected.
Between 17 April and 14 May, the department had worked on developing a proof of concept to see whether it would be possible to establish a surveillance system using data provided by mobile network operators.
The goal of the system would have been to determine the location and movement of positive cases, as well as how many people had been in close contact with them, said Wolmarans.
‘RICA info has also got its difficulties’
But based on the technology available in South Africa and the volumes of cases expected, it would have taken days for the department to get that information.
This made the information null and void.
She said it was difficult to get a person’s location and even more difficult to track their movement, as this information needed to come from cellphone towers.
“It was complex to get within a two-metre radius of an individual. In most of the rural areas, it would have been 100m, and within some of the peri-urban areas, it would have been 50m.
“RICA info has also got its difficulties.”
She said some people who took out cellphone contracts had given their phones to other people, so the contract address was not the same as the address of the user.
It might also happen that a person’s phone was temporarily in another person’s possession.
Wolmarans said they presented their strict protocols on data collection to Covid-19 Judge Kate O’Reagan.
“According to my knowledge, there was no breach or leak and the data was totally encrypted.”
The database had since been destroyed, leaving only names and contact numbers.
A digital contact tracing system was currently operational in all provinces and would soon be launched by the health minister, said Wolmarans.
The system is automated and uses machine learning and chat bots.
A person gets an SMS asking if they would like to receive their test results. If positive, a chat bot asks the individual to share the details of people they have been in contact with in the last seven to 10 days.
“The key is… to inform citizens that if they get a specific message, it’s not a hoax but a real message and they should react.”
Quoted from Source : https://citizen.co.za/news/covid-19/2324008/sa-looked-at-covid-19-cellphone-tracking-but-it-proved-too-complex-health-dept/
Chronic failures in the health system of South Africa’s Eastern Cape have been exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Key staff are on strike or sick with Covid-19 and there are reports of unborn babies dying in overcrowded, understaffed wards.
A BBC investigation found exhausted doctors and nurses who say the province’s health system has collapsed under the strain.
One doctor called it an “epic failure of a deeply corrupt system”. After initially controlling the virus South Africa is experiencing a sharp rise in infections – currently more than 10,000 new cases a day.
Huw Edwards presents BBC News at Ten reporting from Andrew Harding in Port Elizabeth.
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DA submit action plan to the President
Today the DA will send to the Presidency a Covid19 Action Plan that will ensure better healthcare treatment for all South Africans, as well as a far stronger prevention campaign to minimise the imminent strain on our healthcare system.This plan is critical if we are to mount an effective defence against the pandemic, because government’s alternative – indefinite lockdown – cannot be an option.
Our plan takes into account the many challenges unique to South Africa, the biggest of which is undoubtedly the incapability of a state hollowed out by cadre deployment and corruption – all under the guise of “empowerment” – to make critical decisions within a short timeframe and then implement these decisions efficiently across equally incapable provincial and local governments.
Drawing from the experiences of the Western Cape over the past three months, this plan focuses on the following ten areas for success:
1️⃣ Efficient decision-making structures
2️⃣ A coordinated testing programme
3️⃣ Contact tracing
4️⃣ Quarantine and Isolation facilities
5️⃣ Communications campaign
6️⃣ Evidence-based protocols and regulations for non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)
7️⃣ Field hospitals
8️⃣ Oxygen
9️⃣ Staffing
1️⃣0️⃣ Reprioritised funding
The state alone does not have the capacity to oversee or implement a Covid strategy. The decision-making process in a crisis needs to be swift and responsive, and it needs to draw on the expertise and the capacity of a wide range of players outside of government and the state.
Government will have to explain to South Africans why it places their lives so low on its list of priorities. Government will also have to explain what it was doing for more than three months while our country was in lockdown, as millions of people lost all they had. Because it certainly wasn’t building up our healthcare capacity.
But more urgently, government needs to show citizens how they will be kept safe and healthy in the face of a surge of Covid infections.
The DA’s Action Plan will do just this by neutralising as far as possible the massive weaknesses of a corrupt and incapable state.
Read more about theDA’s plan here:
https://www.da.org.za/2020/07/a-covid-19-action-plan-designed-for-an-incapable-state
Explained: What a pulse oximeter is and how it works
BY TANYA FARBER
Image: Jozef Polc/123rf.com
One of SA’s top Covid-19 experts has advised South Africans to “seek help immediately” if they have chest pains and shortness of breath.
“The main symptoms of low oxygen are chest pain and difficulty with breathing,” explains Professor Shabir Madhi, who is on the Covid-19 advisory council to the department of health and is head of the vaccine trials in the country.
He adds that “dizziness” follows as one fails to get enough oxygen to the brain.
He said people should “seek assistance immediately” if they are experiencing “chest pains, shortness of breath, lightheadedness or confusion”, as these are all “telltale signs that your oxygen levels are not adequate”.
Rapid breathing is also a sign.
“If you are taking more than 20 breaths per minute, then you need to receive oxygen,” he told TimesLIVE.
He said it is “difficult to quantify” if many South Africans are failing to seek help when they should, but suspected that “some are delaying seeking care because they’re too afraid of what might happen”.
Across the globe, between 12% to 14% of those who are hospitalised lose their lives and, says Prof Madhi, “South Africa is in the same ballpark figures of what has been observed in other countries”.
Apart from monitoring these symptoms, another way to check oxygen levels is with a pulse oximeter, but these are not readily available to the public in South Africa.
“A pulse oximeter is good to have but they aren’t readily available,” said Madhi. “It’s a medical device so very few pharmacists will have it. But, the symptoms on their own will tell you if you need oxygen.”
It’s a small device that clips onto your finger and measures your oxygen saturation levels, and outside of hospitals, one is most likely to see them in an ambulance or a nursing home.
You need to “make sure your hands are warm” while using one, says Madhi.
Nail polish can also interfere with the readings, so the device should be used without any.
“Your saturation should be above 95,” says Prof Madhi, “if it is under 93 you need to get oxygen.”
While the public may also attempt to measure their own oxygen with smartphone apps or fitness trackers, a British general practitioner, Ann Robinson told The Guardian, “There is no evidence to say that smartphone apps or fitness trackers are accurate enough for this purpose.”
In a small percentage of Covid-19 cases, a person can suffer from what’s known as silent hypoxia — where there is no way of knowing that oxygen levels have dropped to very dangerous levels.
This was first reported in Chinese studies but there was no indication of how commonly this occurs.
Cases then showed up in Europe and the UK.
A letter to the British Journal of Anaesthesia suggests that silent hypoxaemia could result from one’s oxygen and carbon dioxide being low, because if only your oxygen is low, it is high blood carbon dioxide that usually causes breathlessness.
Image: Supplied/Wits
The WHO advises that if you have minor symptoms, such as only a slight cough or a mild fever, “there is generally no need to seek medical care”. It advises such people to stay at home, monitor their symptoms, and follow national guidance on self-isolation.
The WHO advises that people get medical attention immediately if they have any breathing difficulties or pain or pressure in the chest.
Quoted from source : https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2020-07-15-how-to-know-when-you-need-a-hospital-for-covid-19/
Ferial Haffajee – From Daily Maverick
Covid-19’s devastation has seen three million people lose their incomes. And almost half of all households report going hungry in the past three months, a heart-stopping new survey reveals.
On 27 March, the hard lockdown was declared to try to hold off the spread of the Covid-19 virus – and almost immediately the bottom fell out of South Africa.
In less than a month, three million South Africans had lost their incomes and jobs, turning hunger from a problem to a crisis.
A household survey out on 15 July reveals that there was an almost immediate net loss of three million jobs between February and April and women accounted for two million of the people who lost their livelihoods as the economy was shut down.
“Forty-seven percent of respondents reported that their household ran out of money to buy food in April 2020. Prior to the lockdown, 21% of households reported that they ran out of money to buy food in the previous year (according to StatsSA’s General Household Survey of 2018).
A survey published on 15 July has for the first time revealed the triple pandemic that has blown South Africa down with viral force. Led by principal investigator Dr Nic Spaull, this National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey is the first authoritative measure of the impact of Covid-19 on jobs, hunger and poverty.
“The impact is colossal and it shocked us,” said Spaull in an interview with Daily Maverick. Spaull has worked with the country’s top-rated researchers and economists including Haroon Bhorat, Reza Daniels, Murray Leibbrandt, and Servaas van der Berg.
“All of us were numbed. It is devastating and upsetting,” said Spaull.
The big picture – majority of South Africans out of work
The researchers undertook work of enormous thought leadership to explore the impacts – there are 11 papers out.
“The 11 papers revealed that there is a high degree of agreement between researchers on what the key findings are: that employment has declined substantially and that the effects of this are largest for the most disadvantaged. Inequalities along traditional lines of race, gender, occupation, earnings, location and education have all grown significantly. An already unequal national situation has been made much worse.
“One in three income earners in February did not earn an income in April,” which translated into an almost immediate job loss when lockdown was declared.
Professor Reza Daniels and Professor Vimal Ranchhod of UCT School of Economics found that the proportion of adults who earned an income in February declined by 33%, which is made up of a roughly equal share of those who lost their jobs and were furloughed (put on unpaid leave when businesses closed).
This is already a shocker of a number but if you overlay it onto South Africa’s already endemic unemployed, what it means is that more South Africans are unemployed and without any income than those who are working.
And Covid-19 has widened the gulf of inequality in South Africa.
“The overarching finding from this analysis is that the job losses were not uniformly distributed amongst the different groups. In particular, groups who have always been more vulnerable, such as women, African/Blacks, youth and less educated groups have been disproportionately negatively affected,” write Ranchhod and Daniels.
Women hold up half the sky until it falls down
In South Africa, women keep the country going. The typical household in our country is that of the single working mother with children. Covid-19 cut hard but its scythe sliced women’s ability to work and feed their children with an even greater cruelty.
“Women have been more severely affected than men in the early phase of the crisis in South Africa, namely the ‘hard’ lockdown period. Net job losses were higher for women than men with women accounting for two-thirds of the total net job losses. Among those who remained in employment, there was also a bigger fall in average hours worked per week for women than men,” report Daniela Casale and Dorrit Posel of Wits University in the NIDS-CRAM study.
National income studies have long revealed that women across the value chain earn less than men and that the gendered labour market also means that women lost their jobs more quickly as companies shut down in the hard lockdown phase. There are a lot of numbers here, but it’s a vital understanding of how women were impacted.
“In February 2020, or pre-crisis, 46% of women and 59% of men aged 18 and older reported being employed. In April 2020, or the month of the ‘hard’ lockdown, 36% of women and 54% of men reported being employed (or having a job to return to). This amounts to a 22% decline in the share of women employed compared to a 10% decline in the share of men employed between February and April. The gender gap in employment has therefore grown,” report Casale and Posel.
Not to be sensationalist, but this is a disaster for women’s empowerment as it will push women out of the jobs market and down the ladder after decades of incremental improvement.
“Of the approximately 2.9 million net job losses that occurred between February and April among all adults aged 18 and older, women accounted for two-thirds.”
Like most African economies, the informal economy (fruit and vegetable sellers, vetkoek aunties, roadside hot food stalls) is a vital part of the economy. “A larger share of the informal economy relative to formal employment were locked out of employment during April,” the survey says.
In studies of how unpaid work grew as the lockdown extended for months and months, researchers also found that unpaid care work went up substantially by at least four additional hours a day.
Because women head most households, the duty of care for children, and of home-schooling, fell to them. If Covid-19’s impacts have a face, then it is that of the African women.
I am hungry
Most South African homes stay afloat on a mixture of grant and jobs incomes (through jobs in the informal sector or the bottom rungs of the jobs market).
With that gone – in what economists call “income shocks” – people could not put food on the table, as Maverick Citizen has reported throughout the pandemic’s course through South Africa.
Now the survey shows how hard hunger hit. “Forty-seven percent of respondents reported that their household ran out of money to buy food in April 2020… it seems quite clear that the incidence of running out of money to buy food has doubled.
“One in five respondents reported that someone in their household went hungry in the last seven days, and 1-in-7 reported that a child had gone hungry in the last seven days.”
The survey was taken before relief measures and community action networks got into gear, but it does show the utter desperation that the Covid-19 outbreak has carried in its wake.
“In households that experienced hunger in the last seven days, 42% managed to shield children from that hunger,” the survey reveals.
What it paints is a Dickensian picture of adults going without food to ensure that the children have some: “Far too many people, and far too many children, are going hungry,” says the NIDS-CRAM survey.
A month into lockdown, the government announced the first tranche of its relief package as the devastation was clear almost immediately. Even though South Africa’s social solidarity relief net through which 19-million grants are paid every month is unusual in the developing world, it did not touch sides as the lockdown deepened.
This is because poor South Africans knit together a crochet of survivalist strategies that include incomes and grants.
“The possibility of job loss or a downturn in business presented a major threat to the livelihoods of a large proportion of grant-receiving households because, pre-lockdown, many rely on sources of income other than grants.”
Relief and solidarity
Government stepped in and so did significant social solidarity systems like the Solidarity Fund.
While the survey measured the first month of lockdown, further waves of research will keep track of the impacts.
“The social sector and communities have engaged rigorously in relief efforts. During lockdown, 18% of adults reported accessing support for food or shelter from government (8%), NGO’s, churches or other associations (6%) or neighbours and the community (9%).
The survey has confirmed what many reports have shown: the UIF system is a mangle. “Urgent attention needs to be given to rectifying technical glitches that exist in the UIF system,” says the survey, which found that only 20% of those surveyed who were eligible for the temporary employment relief (TERS) payment received it. The social relief of distress grant (SRD) could be a nifty tactic to get money into homes gnawed by hunger, but at the time of the survey it had not worked smoothly: of about six million applicants, just under one million had received the R350 grant at the time of the survey.
Government is mulling a permanent basic income grant and this is universally confirmed by the researchers as the best method of preventing a fall into extreme poverty by more South Africans.
“Global poverty projections suggest that the international response to the virus will push over 70 million people into extreme poverty, with sub-Saharan Africa being hardest hit,” says the survey.
All 11 research reports will be publicly available here at noon on 15 July.
The project is a telephone survey of 7,000 households that is recognised as nationally representative. It will continue over five “waves”. DM
Quoted Direct from Source : https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-07-15-the-day-the-bottom-fell-out-of-south-africa-a-triple-pandemic-has-hit-us
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