The four astronauts assigned to NASA’s last space shuttle flight can’t seem to escape all the fuss and hubbub.
With just eight days until Atlantis blasts off, the astronauts said on Thursday they are still getting last-minute requests. Relatives, acquaintances and special-interest groups are all clamoring for launch tickets, and just about everyone wants the astronauts to take something of theirs on the last shuttle ride.
“People are procrastinators, right? You’ve always wanted to go see a shuttle launch and all of a sudden it’s the last one, but it’s really nice to see all the enthusiasm,” astronaut Sandra Magnus said in an interview.
At a press conference, commander Christopher Ferguson said there is so much hoopla surrounding the last mission that he can’t wait to go into quarantine. Shuttle crews always take up residence at Johnson Space Center in Houston a week before liftoff to avoid germs.
Ferguson and his crew will fly on to Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, where they’ll remain in quarantine. Liftoff is set for 11:26am on Friday for the 12-day delivery mission to the International Space Station.
Co-pilot Douglas Hurley said the astronauts have the easy part, sitting on the rocket and launching.
“It’s real tough on your family and friends,” he said.
Astronaut Rex Walheim said the crew had been bombarded with requests for NASA passes to see the launch up close from within Kennedy Space Center. Each astronaut got 330 tickets to dole out.
Veterans have put in requests for tickets and so have sick children, plus there are all the family, friends, co-workers, even casual acquaintances. NASA anticipates 45,000 guests at the center on launch day — outside the gates, between 500,000 and 750,000 people are expected to jam area roads.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema