NASA still deciding whether to keep 2 astronauts at space station until next year

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NASA still deciding whether to keep 2 astronauts at space station until next year

2024-08-15 02:59 Last Updated At：03:00

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA said Wednesday it's still deciding whether to keep two astronauts at the International Space Station until early next year and send their troubled Boeing capsule back empty.

Rather than flying Boeing’s Starliner back to Earth, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams would catch a ride on SpaceX’s next flight. That option would keep them at the space station until next February.

The test pilots anticipated being away just a week or so when they rocketed away as Starliner's first crew. But thruster failures and helium leaks marred the capsule’s trip to the space station, raising doubts about its ability to return safely and leaving the astronauts in limbo.

NASA officials said they're analyzing more data before making a decision by end of next week or beginning of the next. These thrusters are crucial for holding the capsule in the right position when it comes time to descend from orbit.

“We’ve got time available before we bring Starliner home and we want to use that time wisely,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s space operations mission chief.

NASA's safety chief Russ DeLoach added: “We don’t have enough insight and data to make some sort of simple, black-and-white calculation."

DeLoach said the space agency wants to make room for all opinions unlike what happened on NASA's two shuttle tragedies, Challenger and Columbia, when dissenting views were ignored.

“That may mean, at times, we don’t move very fast because we're getting everything out, and I think you can kind of see that at play here,” he said.

Switching to SpaceX would require bumping two of the four astronauts assigned to the next ferry flight, currently targeted for late September. Wilmore and Williams would take the empty seats in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule once that half-year mission ends.

Another complication: The space station has just two parking places for U.S. capsules. Boeing’s capsule would have to depart ahead of the arrival of SpaceX's Dragon in order to free up a spot.

Boeing maintains Starliner could still safely bring the astronauts home. The company earlier this month posted a list of testing done on thrusters in space and on the ground since liftoff.

NASA would like to keep SpaceX’s current crew up there until the replacements arrive, barring an emergency. Those four should have returned to Earth this month, but saw a seventh month added to their mission because of the uncertainty over Starliner, keeping them up there until the end of September. Most space station stays last six months, although some have gone a full year.

Wilmore and Williams are retired Navy captains who spent months aboard the space station years ago. They eased into space station work as soon as they arrived, helping with experiments and repairs.

“They will do what we ask them to do. That’s their job as astronauts,” said NASA chief astronaut Joe Acaba.

He added: “This mission is a test flight and as Butch and Suni expressed ahead of their launch, they knew this mission might not be perfect.”

Eager to have competing services and backup options, NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing to transport astronauts to and from the space station after the shuttles retired in 2011.

SpaceX’s first astronaut flight was in 2020. Boeing suffered so much trouble on its initial test flight without a crew in 2019 that a do-over was ordered. Then more problems cropped up, costing the company more than $1 billion to fix before finally flying astronauts.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Israeli strike on hospital tent camp kills 4 and ignites a fire that burns dozens

2024-10-14 15:53 Last Updated At：16:00

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli airstrike on a hospital courtyard in the Gaza Strip early Monday killed at least four people and triggered a fire that swept through a tent camp for people displaced by the war, leaving more than two dozen with severe burns, according to Palestinian medics.

The Israeli military said it targeted militants hiding out among civilians, without providing evidence. In recent months it has repeatedly struck crowded shelters and tent camps, alleging that Hamas fighters were using them as staging grounds for attacks.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah was already struggling to treat a large number of wounded from an earlier strike on a school-turned-shelter that killed at least 20 people when the early morning airstrike hit and fire engulfed many of the tents.

Several secondary explosions could be heard after the initial strike, but it was not immediately clear if they were caused by weapons or fuel tanks.

Associated Press footage showed children among the wounded. A man sobbed as he carried a toddler with a bandaged head in his arms. Another small child with a bandaged leg was given a blood transfusion on the floor of the packed hospital.

Hospital records showed that four people were killed and 40 wounded. Twenty-five people were transferred to the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza after suffering severe burns, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Israel is still carrying out near-daily strikes across the Gaza Strip more than a year into the war, and has been waging a major ground assault in the north, where it says militants have regrouped.

The war began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, while Palestinian militants abducted around 250 hostages. Around 100 are still being held inside Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters but says women and children make up more than half the fatalities. Around 90% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million people have been displaced by the war, often multiple times, and large areas of the coastal territory have been completely destroyed.

Israel has ordered the entire remaining population of the northern third of Gaza, estimated at around 400,000 people, to evacuate to the south and has not allowed any food to enter the north since the start of the month. Hundreds of thousands of people from the north heeded Israeli evacuation orders at the start of the war and have not been allowed to return.

That has raised fears among Palestinians that Israel intends to implement a plan devised by former generals in which it would order all civilians out of northern Gaza and label anyone remaining there a combatant — a surrender-or-starve strategy that rights groups say would violate international law. The plan has been presented to the Israeli government, but it's unclear whether it has been adopted.

With no end in sight to the war in Gaza, Israel is also waging an air and ground war in southern Lebanon against the Hezbollah militant group, an ally of Hamas that has been firing rockets into northern Israel for more than a year. Israel has also threatened to strike Iran in retaliation for a ballistic missile attack, raising the prospect of an all-out regionwide war.

A Hezbollah aerial attack on an army base in northern Israel killed four soldiers — all of them 19 years old — and severely wounded seven others Sunday, the military said, in the deadliest strike by the militant group since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago.

Hezbollah called the attack near Binyamina city retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people. It said it targeted Israel’s elite Golani brigade, launching dozens of missiles to occupy Israeli air defense systems during the assault by drones.

Israel’s national rescue service said the attack wounded 61. It’s rare for so many people to be wounded by drones or missiles, most of which are intercepted by Israel's multitiered air defenses or fall in open areas.

Magdy reported from Cairo.

Find more of AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.