All That Glitters Isn’t Gold But This Podcast Sure Is… – Press Release – Digital Journal

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NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE/ September 2, 2020 / Wedding dress designer and TLC's "Say Yes to The Dress" regular, Hayley Paige, and her fiance, fitness vlogger and personal trainer, Conrad Louis, talk about love, life, and bring on some stellar guests in their inaugural podcast "All That Glitters".

Both entrepreneurs who self identify as individuals who are empowerment-focused in their respective fields join forces to dig even deeper and make personal betterment their focus.

"We both come from backgrounds that are heavily focused on aesthetics and we felt compelled to explore a more intimate medium that focuses on our inner tapestry with respect to relationships, self-awareness, and fortitude of character," says Hayley.

Using the postponement of their wedding Hayley and Conrad were compelled to turn this set back into an opportunity to help spread optimism in a time when there is so much doubt and uncertainty.

"Life and love demand our full presence of mind; we want to share principles and tactics that have helped us along the way and spotlight mastered individuals to address things outside our repertoire," says Conrad. "We might be figuring out some of it as we go, but we are also investing in tried-and-true ways to show up better prepared and more resourceful."

Each episode shares actionable tools on keeping love and life creative, establishing boundaries that better serve YOU, and shedding light on behaviors that make life more loving. This podcast also invites all kinds of people from all facets of life, including CIO and founder of Melvin Capital and minority-owner of the Charlotte Hornets, Gabe Plotkin; high performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais; and pop culture couple Kaitlyn Bristowe and Jason Tartick from the Bachelorette.

"People are trying to do something that sounds good in a conversation," says the Bachelorette's Jason Tartick in "All That Glitters Podcast" Episode 12. He continues, " ...they're worried about their title, where they work, [and] what their identity is. People aren't pursuing their skill-set (what they're gifted at) and what they can do best. They're worried about presenting this facade..." Like Tartick, Hayley and Conrad are compelled to encourage their listeners to embrace who they are and what they have as opposed to their deficiencies and perceived inadequacies.

"All That Glitters" is a weekly podcast cataloguing new episodes every Wednesday.

Follow All That Glitters Podcast on Instagram: @allthatglittersonthegram @misshayleypaige @conradlouis and visit us on the web at http://www.allthatglitterspodcast.com

Photo Credit: Chard Photo ( @chardphoto )"

Kiley AlmyNext Wave MarketingKiley@nextwavemktg.com

SOURCE:All That Glitters

View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/604549/All-That-Glitters-Isnt-Gold-But-This-Podcast-Sure-Is

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All That Glitters Isn't Gold But This Podcast Sure Is... - Press Release - Digital Journal

Cecile Houel of Fort Madison and France leads art shows by women in the Quad Cities – Burlington Hawk Eye

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By Bob Saar for The Hawk Eye| The Hawk Eye

The celebration of the 100th anniversary the 19th amendment continues in the Quad Cities Area this weekend with showings by French artist Cecile Houel and other area women.

The 19th amendment assured women the right to vote in the United States.

French-born artist Houel imbues her art with a deep passion for diversity and justice, and that passion is evident in her ongoing project portraits of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates.

Houel brings her to-date completed works to four Quad Cities locations Aug.29 through Oct.28.

Houel has won international acclaim in the world of pastels and now focuses on multi-media, including sculpture.

Sponsored by WVIK and Quad-Cities NPR, Nobel Peace Prize Collection: Peace Starts Within will run from August 28 through October 28 at the Berskin Art Gallery & Academy, 2967 State St. in Bettendorf and three other QCA locations.

Houel said the show has been in preparation for about a year and began when artist and former Houel student Rose Moore of Galesburg, Ill. introduced Houel to Pat Berskin, who liked Houel's Nobel collection, and the two talked about putting a show together.

"Initially it was to be just her gallery," Houel said.

The concept expanded and now includes:

A Portrait of Remarkable Women" at Quad-City International Airport in Moline, Illinois,is six Houel portraits of female Nobel Prize Laureates including Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel and Barack Obama. Sponsored by Quad City Arts in an exhibition beginning September 3, that exhibition includes portraits by artist Heidi Hernandez and sculptures by 11 area women;

Two of Houel's portraits at the German American Heritage Museum & Center in Davenport; and

Two portraits are on display in the RiverCenter/Adler Theatre showcases in Davenport.

Hernandez also will have works displayed at the German American Heritage Museum, Berskin Gallery and the Adler showcases. Rose Moore will have her portraits at the Adler as well.

Houel said she began her Nobel project about five years ago and plans to do portraits of all 107 Nobel Peace Laureates. Working from her studio in Fort Madisonshe completes 10 of the intensely personal 4-foot-square portraits each year.

Born to a Catholic father and a Muslim mother, Houel said she witnessed discrimination while growing up in the Middle East.

I have a deep compassion for diversity, she said, adding that her goal is to create peace events where she can display all of her works.

Pat Berskin, owner of the Berskin gallery, sees the Houel exhibition as a perfect opportunity for families involved in online schooling to learn about these important figures in history. A downloadable Passport for Peace on the gallery website at bereskinartgallery.com lists where each piece is displayed in the QCA and gives a biography of each Laureate.

Together we will have a body of work that tells the history and importance of working for peace through the lives and brushstrokes of Cecile Houel, Berskin said.

Houel said people in Lee and Des Moines counties will find the drive to the QCA worthwhile.

"It's not only a show but an event," she said. "It's a chance for a fun trip into the Quad Cities; it will be cultural and, eventually, you can have a good meal. And in the pandemic time, I think it is good to keep an interest in what is happening in the world."

Reception for Houel

When: 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.Friday, Sept. 4

Where:The BerskinArt Gallery & Academy, 2967 State St. in Bettendorf

Masks and social distancing are required. Refreshments including snacks and wine will be served with social distancing straws provided.

Other women's events are at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport: Seen and Heard: The Art of Empowerment featuring women artists who asserted their artistic growth despite social and cultural barriers. Also, the Putnam Museum in Davenport has a current exhibit on the roots of the local womens suffrage movement in Liberated Voices/Changed Lives.

Other examples of Houels work can be seen online at cecilehouel.com.

The Berskin Art Gallery & Academy, 2967 State St., Bettendorf, Iowa.

For more information visit bereskinartgallery.com.

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Cecile Houel of Fort Madison and France leads art shows by women in the Quad Cities - Burlington Hawk Eye

My Decision to Move to Rural Zimbabwe – it Just Felt Right! – Real Leaders

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There was no guarantee of support, infrastructure or financial help to make it happen. The decision to move was based on intuition. To Knuth, it just felt right.

When she arrived, Knuth couldnt do anything about farming or sanitation, so she decided to focus on what she could do facilitate. She wanted the local people to see the value of what they already knew about farming and other practical things, and have a positive approach to it. The turning point for her was when she celebrated a birthday in Zimbabwe together with her international friends and the local people. She realized that they had different skills and together they could do great things.

Knuth is half Danish and half Zimbabwean. She remembers well the moment when she decided to leave her international career and move to Zimbabwe. She has become increasingly reliant on her intuition and says that it has become the most important resource for herself, and anybody needing to trust themselves and develop self-confidence.

Kufunda is based on a typical African village. Its inhabitants were demoralized from the grinding poverty and stuck in a mental cycle that kept them in a mindset of scarcity. Now, after 15 years, Kufunda includes 30 farmers and 60 community members, including children and relatives. There is a Waldorf-inspired school to help children develop the emotional intelligence and self-awareness for personal growth. The village is designed by the local community to ensure real empowerment and to implement local knowledge that already existed.

Each persons journey is important and Its what makes Kufunda different from all the other initiatives that may look the same. We see the person being left behind and want them to think out of the box, says Knuth. We try to give each individual self-confidence, instead of just academically-focused education. Kufunda helps community members rediscover their creativity and is a platform for their own projects to unfold. People are coming together and looking into the future, building a vision.

Additionally, a strong relationship with the local councillors has been built and Kufundas success is now used as a model in other parts of the country.

I think my personal courage comes from listening, says Knuth. I listen and learn. Im fulfilling the destiny I was meant to carry out. I know in my gut and in my heart when Im on track and Ive learned to listen to my intuition, to my gut. When Im on the right track I feel courageous, as if nothing can stop me. It becomes easier with age to learn to listen to yourself and to say no when something doesnt feel right.

If I can give one recommendation, she concludes. Have trust in yourself. Trust your sense of right and wrong and when something doesnt feel right, dont rush ahead, but take a step back. Have the courage to stay until your path is clear.

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My Decision to Move to Rural Zimbabwe - it Just Felt Right! - Real Leaders

‘This is about abuses of power’: the shocking true story of the Nxivm cult – The Guardian

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If youve heard of Nxivm in the last couple of years, it was probably because of shocking, salacious headlines sex cult, starvation diets, initials branded on womens crotches, master slaves organized by the former Smallville actor Allison Mack. The extent of the groups abuse, as exposed in court, a New York Times expos and several memoirs, was indeed galling and nauseating, but the most horrifying details overshadowed a confusing, chameleonic and far more deceptive road to ruin. As documented in The Vow, a nine-part HBO series which follows former members as they reckon with their participation in the group and attempt to destroy it, the path to involvement in Nxivm which billed itself as an ethical training program under the vanguard leadership of Keith Raniere was far more insidious and seemingly innocuous than one might assume.

Its not as though the women of DOS, the secret, all-female group orchestrated by Raniere to twist female empowerment into coerced sex under threat of collateral blackmail, joined Nxivm looking for a master/slave relationship. (The name DOS is a Latin acronym allegedly meaning Lord/Master of the Obedient Female Companions). Had Raniere initially said, Hey guys, welcome to executive success, Im going to burn my initials into your crotch, I wouldve thought differently, Sarah Edmondson, a former Nxivm member who displayed her branding scar in the 2017 Times article and serves as co-narrator for The Vow, told the Guardian. If you think it would never happen to you, it makes you a prime candidate, she said. Because you need to understand how it would.

The Vow provides ample space for former members of Ranieres orbit, in particular Edmondson and documentarian Mark Vicente, to explain their journeys into and out of the organization in at first benign, then harrowing detail. The show, created by the Oscar-nominated film-makers Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer (The Square), derives its sensitivity toward former Nxivm members in part from personal experience; Noujaim once participated in one of Nxivms five-day executive success intensive programs.

In 2006, Noujaim was at the top of my game, she told the Guardian she had just become the first woman and youngest person to win the Ted prize for her film Control Room but had some very big questions in my life. At a Ted-related retreat on Richard Bransons island, she was introduced to Nxivm by Sarah Bronfman, the billionaire heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune who, along with her sister Claire, bankrolled Raniere. Two years later, Noujaim met Vicente, who convinced her to sign up for the five-day workshop at the groups home base outside Albany, New York.

There were a few red flags, she recalled the reverence with which members of the group spoke of Raniere, the hierarchy demarcated by strange colored sashes but overall, Noujaim found the group fascinating. She met executives, Harvard graduates, ambitious creatives who believed that they could change their lives and that they could change the world with this new ethical mission, she said. They shared a kind of idealism that I found refreshing.

Edmondson had a similarly warm experience with Nxivm at first; when she joined on Vicentes recommendation in 2005, she was going on 27, adrift in her career, and wondering whats my purpose here? Whats meaningful to me? What do I want to do? Who am I?

Nxivm appeared to offer a chance at radical self-improvement, its multi-level marketing recruitment tactics masked as an empowering commitment peddled above a stream of always be optimizing, boss-bitch feminism. As women, in this culture, were never OK were never thin enough, were never perky enough, nothing is ever enough, said Edmondson. That was the motor behind so much of what we did, and I hate that. Edmondsons parents were therapists, but she found the weekly work of therapy tedious and boring; Nxivm was sort of like a diet pill in that it proposed to fix you in five days. As documented in The Vow and her 2019 memoir Scarred, Edmondson threw herself into the group as a mentor, overriding concerns about Ranieres unquestioned leadership role.

In 2017, a decade after she first enrolled in a Nxivm class, which she paused because of a work commitment, Noujaim reconnected with Vicente in Los Angeles, who encouraged her to finish the program. So she was surprised when Vicente missed the programs closing party at her house, and no longer responded to her texts.

A few weeks later, Vicente explained why: he and his wife, the former Star Wars actor and musician Bonnie Piesse, had defected from the organization. They, along with actor Edmondson, another longtime Nxivm member who had founded the center in Vancouver a few years prior, were awakened to Ranieres sexual abuses, psychological control and the terrifying realization that for years, they had participated in and recruited for a cult. Amer and Noujaim started filming what seemed at first to be two individual stories of escape, as Edmondson and Vicente/Piesse tunneled their way out and attempted to bring others close friends, members of their wedding parties, people they had introduced to Nxivm with them.

The Vow burrows under your skin in ways hard to predict, largely because of the accounting by Edmondson and Vicente, who unravel Nxivms toxicity and abuse through reconsideration of their memories, photos and pamphlets from a group that became their career and family, and, most importantly, extensive audio and video evidence. The first episode presents what seems to be a weird but ultimately harmless self-improvement group; the second and third reveal the depths of manipulation and smokescreens to be near bottomless. Edmondson in particular speaks to the bizarre experience of waking up in an indefensible pot of water you didnt realize was boiling. Its so hard to explain these things in soundbites, because its over 12 years of indoctrination, she said.

Nxivm, she explained, seemed initially to make your impulses legible why you sink into the couch when you should go to the gym, why you turn to cheesecake when youre stressed. DOS was introduced to Edmondson by her best friend, Lauren Salzman, who pitched the group as committing to override that for a higher principle, to not indulge in those feelings, to follow through on those goals you set. (Salzman later testified against Raniere and pleaded guilty to racketeering.) The idea that your ideology could be stronger than your body theres truth in that, Edmondson said. Thats the fucked-up thing about Nxivm theres a lot of truth and a lot of good nuggets, but then those are warped for personal gain.

Raniere and the women closest to him, most notably Mack, twisted self-improvement into self-blame; Keith tried to teach us that the victims are the abusers, said Edmondson. We were taught in Nxivm that there were no victims, that you can never be victimized.

The Vows later episodes document DOSs unraveling in the fall of 2017, as the #MeToo movement triggered a wave of public reckonings, as well of the depths of Ranieres depravity (in June 2019, Raniere was convicted of federal crimes including sex trafficking of children, conspiracy and conspiracy to commit forced labor; his sentencing is scheduled for 27 October). For Edmondson, the days since coming forward to the New York Times have been a really, really long journey. Shes done extensive therapy with cult experts, worked with a psychologist, a couples counselor with her husband, Anthony Nippy Ames, also a former Nxivm member. Shes connected former members with pro bono attorneys (Nxivm was notoriously litigious with defectors). Some days shes reaching a new normal at her home in Vancouver, others she becomes infuriated, because these are friends of mine, people who were at my wedding, she said. And I want to shake them and wake them up. But I cant.

The series will, she hopes, break stereotypes about how groups like this form and how people get hooked and impart lessons beyond the judgment wall that is the polarizing word cult.

This isnt about cults; this is about abuses of power, she said. And those happen in organizations, in churches and religions, it happens within families.

Everybody is indoctrinated in some way, it just depends what your indoctrination is, said Noujaim. And looking at the process of questioning each one of us, no matter what we believe, need to continually go through a process of questioning.

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'This is about abuses of power': the shocking true story of the Nxivm cult - The Guardian

Citizens for the Advancement of Community Development hosts virtual graduation – mississauga.com

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However, like many other not-for-profit organizations, CACD was severely impacted by COVID-19.

In this regard, we have seen an abrupt loss in revenue as a result of the cancellation of fundraising events, a steep dropoff of donations and contributions, reduction in individual giving, and earned income opportunities.

Besides, while grappling with the closure of our office at the Mississauga Valley Community Centre and cancellation of our programs and services, performances, workshops, gatherings, and events, we have experienced unprecedented human resource challenges with paid staff and volunteers.

With these challenges, we moved much of our work online and radically transformed our services to accommodate the requirements for physical distancing. We operated, by modifying our existing programs, developing new ones to meet online platforms; however, at a financial and human cost to the organization.

All be it, we remained vigilant and resilient. And on August 26, we were able to convene a number of our participants for a virtual graduation ceremony.

This session saw some members, community leaders, a teacher, parents, and special guests such as Coun. John Kovac, who brought greetings, a video message from Mayor Bonnie Crombie, and Mrs. Patricia Bebia Mawa, vice-president of Silvertrust Media and chair of the Reelworld Film Festival, bringing the keynote message.

Despite our youth being more educated and more socially connected online than the prior generation, they still face a multitude of challenges.

With all the nuances experienced in this pandemic, Black youth, in particular, are even more challenged with issues of systemic barriers, disenfranchisement, marginalization, racism and discrimination within the school system, sense of belonging and pride, finding a full-time job, experiencing social exclusion, and mental health issues.

In this regard, since the fall of 2019, CACD has been targeting Black youth with specialized programming, Black Youth Empowerment Initiative (BYEI), a project sponsored by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

In it, students in middle and high school are taught leadership, mentoring, digital literacy and Black Canadian history.

We offered virtual sessions in anti-Black Racism, Black Canadian History, addressing issues of diversity and inclusion and systemic barriers to employment, and workshops in movie production.

At the end of this BYEI project, participants have expressed a greater sense of pride and spoke of the importance of seeing their culture reflected in the program.

They agreed that they learned a lot in the program about digital literacy and valued the opportunity of expanded career aspiration.

They acknowledged that the program was meaningful and that the topical areas meet their needs. They spoke about the higher intrinsic motivation and feeling positive about interacting with their peers in the program and that they experienced a significant enhancement of their leadership skills attitude, particularly in areas of volunteering.

They agreed that the BYEI project was positive, responsive, and aided their academic skills development needs.

As alluded to earlier, this meaningful project came to an end and culminated in the virtual graduation ceremony on August 26 when they were further celebrated and validated for their hard work, persistence and perseverance.

The Mayor, in her message, congratulated CACD for its continued service to strengthen, empower and mentor the youth in our community.

She congratulated all the graduates but made personal mention of Tyric Thom, for his perfect attendance, most community service hours, and student participant of the year, Alexander Attah, for his leadership, commitment and dedication to the BYEI project.

Blaine Robinson was praised for being the most helpful and co-operative participant. The Mayor pointed out that life is full of opportunity: if you can dream it, you can be whoever you want to be.

Keynote speaker Mawa spoke most passionately and touchingly, moving all to quivers of excitement.

She emphasized three key points. Firstly, the participants are special and that they should believe in themselves and remember who they are. To make this clear, she referred to Simbas experience from the Lion King, as a story to inspire and motivate.

Secondly, she mentioned that nothing is impossible. In conclusion, she offered that in each of them, there is a seed of greatness. That there is no gain without pain and that there is no substitute for the boldness and excellence.

The executive director, Ron Cunningham, also added his salute to the graduates and added that despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a delight to be able to fulfil the BYEI project mandate and that the past few months have has been on an unforgettable journey for himself too.

He ended up quoting former U.S. president Barack Obama: "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

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Citizens for the Advancement of Community Development hosts virtual graduation - mississauga.com

Missing the 6th element: Crew decision-making – Skies Mag – Skies Magazine

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Excerpt from TSB Accident Investigation Report A19W0015, 30 January 2019 [1]

Decision-making is defined as the thought process of selecting a logical choice from available options, projecting the consequences into the future and assessing possible collateral damage. It is a fundamental skill related to intelligence and autonomy. In aviation, decision-making often includes an interpersonal relation dimension. Not only does the pilot have to be able to weigh the pros and cons of several options before deciding on one, he/she needs the skills to effectively communicate the whole process to the other crew member. This in turn must be paralleled by a sophisticated ability to integrate the other pilots processes into the mix. In complex-system operations such as aviation, crew decision-making is a demanding process. Putting the whole operation on hold long enough to reach a consensus opinion seems to be next to impossible.

Regulatory and procedural frameworks are provided to pilots to facilitate the recognition-primed decisions [2] (RPD) pilots make on a daily basis. RPDs are quick decisions such as going around when traffic blocks the landing runway. Certainly, the most famous example of RPD is Capt Chesley Sullenbergers call for ditching U.S. Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. This article addresses the long decision-making process required when pilots face complex and nuanced situations that reduce the margins of safety. It focusses essentially on non-LOFT operations.

In 2017, the Canadian Minister of Transport leaped forward in the assessment of the commercial pilots competency by modernizing the six elements approved check pilots (ACPs) must measure during the pilot proficiency check (PPC) [3]. Four new non-technical elements were introduced in a remarkable effort to measure the overall efficiency of the carriers training programs to teach the crew how to cooperate, how to manage the flight deck, how to build and maintain high levels of situational awareness and how to make decisions. Twenty-five times [4] during PPC rides pilots are evaluated in real time against a four-point marking matrix designed to record technical errors and non-technical deviances.

The actual process of running six elements on two pilots performing 25 in-flight exercises in real time requires a solid background in theory from ACPs. This knowledge base includes not only the companys standard operating procedures (SOP) and the flight test guide [5], but what constitutes the foundation of good cooperation in the cockpit. Good leadership and managerial skills, how to maintain situational awareness at optimal levels and a solid knowledge of the five steps of safe and efficient decision-making round out the required body of theoretical knowledge. For the 30 years I have been training Canadian ACPs I have advised it will take up to two full years to feel comfortable in the role, due in part to the breadth of knowledge required. This learning curve is echoed by the ACPs themselves when they show up on recurrent courses every three years.

When ACPs observe a non-technical deviance during an exercise leading to a sub-standard mark for that phase of flight, a comment must accompany the score on the PPC Report Form. This comment documents the non-technical element(s) contributing to the weak performance. Statistics from the Flight Training and Aviation Education (FTAE) [6] database involving the CAR 705 Canadian air carriers show non-RPD Decision-Making mentioned only twice for having genuinely contributed to sub-standard marks in 200,325 exercises evaluated in 2019-20 [7]. The most commonly cited non-technical element is poor situational awareness.

Over the years, more mandatory exercises found their way into the long list of PPC exercises, thus busying the traditional four-hour simulator booking. The speed with which ACPs must assess the crews performance can certainly explain why the last element of the list is rarely evoked. But perhaps the most noteworthy reason why is the way PPC rides are scripted as concentrated successions of exercises with little time or even need, to actually make decisions. Decades of economic pressures, PPC Schedule I [8] growth and Operational Evaluation Board [9] compliance have driven the industry to produceefficientPPC scripts in order to fit ever more exercises into tight simulator bookings. Some operators even flirted with three and a half-hour simulator bookings in an effort to fit more sessions into each day.

ACPs are directed to assess the element decision-making under five distinct sub-elements: 1)Problem definition/diagnosis, looking for personal-bias free information gathering and crew resource management (CRM)-based review of the causal factors. 2)Option generation, assessing how the crew worked together to develop alternatives based on all the available resources. 3)Risk assessment, measuring how the crew projected the potential collateral damages on the remainder of the flight. 4)Option selection, appraising how clearly the chosen option was stated and agreed on. 5)Outcome review, validating that the crew compared the result with their expectations.

Research show four interferences to good decision-making in the cockpit: ambiguity of information; dynamically changing risks; goal conflicts (organisational or social pressures); and unanticipated consequences [10]. Time after time, accident reports show that when immersed in threat and/or error management, crew underestimated the risk associated with the aircraft state. Significantly, they persevered in a course of action in the face of evidence suggesting that the chosen course was inappropriate [11].

When complex, nuanced threats are introduced to the crew, ACPs have great opportunities to effectively measure the sixth element. The more complex the scenario, the better the assessment and the C-A-L debriefing [12] that follows. That said, assessing crew decision-making takes time and time is what approved check pilots dont have. They control when the process begins, but have to wait until the crew implements a consensual option, marking the end of the procedure. As the process runs into disruptions and interruptions, decision-making is not only variable in length, it might never reach conclusion. ACPs know that engaging the crew into a time-variable, five-step decision-making process could impede PPC completion in the allocated time.

Introduced in September 2019 as an aftermath to Air France 447 [13], mandatory annual surprise and startle effect training (SSET) further emphasizes the need for pilots to slow down when facing complex threats to the operation. Handling procedures more deliberately and slowing them down allows pilots to recognize the loss and to re-build situational awareness and control. The key objective is to train pilots to do the strict minimum while they gather enough dynamic information before making any decisions that will impact the safety of the flight. This needed improvement in crew dynamics further slows down the actual process of making decisions in the cockpit.

Despite the shortcomings of the actual, perhaps outdated PPC program, its overarching objective remains to assess the quality of the company training program. Valid, representative and comprehensive PPC rides enable the chief pilot to steer the training pilots where they are most needed. But quality training is intrinsic to the programs effectiveness and success, which also applies to LOFTs.

Unlike training schemes where elite Olympic athletes align peak performances with competition days, PPC rides are often seen as just another step in the pilots learning curve. With time, this approach infuses a detached emotional response from trainers when substandard performances are observed during training sessions. The pilots will perform better tomorrow. In some departments, training is a succession of tomorrows and the ride itself becomes just another tomorrow. The pilots will learn on the line. The systemic deviance is progressively normalized.

Training decision-making and measuring its effectiveness is better achieved when performed several times on the same crew during different training sessions. It requires competent professional training pilots, well versed with the powerful cognitive biases affecting decision-making. Without exception, all training sessions lend themselves to this. Some operators have already begun offloading training lessons to give more discretionary time to training pilots in order to detect non-technical deviances, and, at last, to react before the deviances are normalized.

In 2018, Montreal-Based Air Transat streamlined cross crew qualification (CCQ) courses and is planning a similar remodeling for new-hire courses with emphasis on the four non-technical elements. New resources are being added to better train and support training pilots, acknowledging a clear return on investment of every dollar invested in training.

Fast-growing Nolinor, based in Mirabel, also recalibrated its recurrent training program on a three-year cycle to provide more discretionary time to training pilots. Using PPC, loft and flight data monitoring statistics, Nolinor reinforced the feedback loop with the training department in a systemic effort to address problematic issues before they become normalized.

Since 2015, Air Inuit makes a full ACP course mandatory for all training pilots, knowing that some could move to major airlines before becoming ACPs. Not only the training quality meets the best test standards but it tends to diffuse more efficiently during regular line operations. Air Inuit feels the ROI is well worth the effort. [14]

Based in Saint-Hubert, Que., 703 operator Max Aviation overhauled the company training program and made FTD use mandatory, from new recruit hiring to line training. The use of FTD was also made mandatory for SMS-related remedial training when warranted. Even during pilot-shortage situations, we prefer terminating unsuccessful training attempts [rather] than allowing pilots to fly on the line with substandard proficiency. [15]

Empowered training pilots build commitment towards their role in a company. When properly supported by management, they dont disengage easily. They become risk-adverse, willing to invest in problem-solving at their level. They readily deploy company and personal training strategies to actively transfer knowledge and validate the learning on a continuing basis. Empowerment tends to make training positions more attractive to pilots motivated by the desire to train, educate and elevate skillsets, rather than the desire to fly less, stay home more often or exert greater control over monthly schedules.

One of the first questions that come to mind is How much would Training 2.0 cost?Perhaps a more pertinent question should beCan we really afford not to do it? Many accidents occur as the result of repeated, persistent hazards and risks. These hazards and risks have been the subject of multiple reviews and recommendations calling for mitigation measures, and yet they continue to lead to accidents. [16] The costs of haphazard pilot training are not limited to those resulting from bad judgment and mismanagement of critical operations. Recommending pilots to the PPC ride who failed to reach criterion performance levels after incomplete, or worse, complaisant training exposes the carrier to the ballistic costs associated with a fatal hull loss, notwithstanding intangible human and reputation-related costs.

More stakeholders need to facilitate extended training programs, beginning with the Regulator allowing operators to use affordable flight training devices, locally installed and readily available, with full training credits. Freeing the air carriers from the pseudo-scientific lobby for costly Full Flight Simulators for LOFT-like sessions would certainly pave the way to new processes. Certifying training pilots, especially CRM facilitators, as originally intended in AC 700-042 [17] would also serve the cause.

Never in the history of aviation has the cost of human error has been so high. The Canadian industry is doing fantastically well. But better training will mean even fewer reportable events, close calls and bad press.

Footnotes:

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Missing the 6th element: Crew decision-making - Skies Mag - Skies Magazine

DAs policy proposals are counter-transformative – Mail and Guardian

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The Democratic Alliance (DA) holds its first policy conference this weekend to discuss and hopefully adopt both its values document and its position paper on economic justice titled Economic justice: a sustainable development goal model.

The DA must be commended for making the documents public and inviting input. In this regard I thought it proper to participate and do so robustly. In order not to get lost in the maze of detailed socio-economic measures the party proposes in its position paper, I will first focus on the underlying commitments outlined in the draft values document and how these permeate throughout its economic plan.

At the heart of the foundational values of the DA are individual freedom and equality of opportunity.

Individuals must be free to make choices on how to lead their lives as long as they do not cause harm to others, including the freedom to make choices in a market economy. The role of the state is to preserve and expand these choices, similar to what the leading proponent of libertarianism, Robert Nozick, argues in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Recall what the DA leadership told us in the context of the hard lockdown: that government did not trust us as responsible citizens and that we had become a nanny state. These claims appeared not to appreciate the purpose of government, and did not take into account how South Africans were disproportionately equipped to deal with the pandemic, materially and psychologically.

Whoever believes that the DA is just about individual rights and that it does not recognise groups is mistaken. Well, the DA recognises that there are social groups based on cultural, religious, political and linguistic factors, but what does not exist are racial groups. According to its values document, there is scientific consensus that race itself does not exist. (We may ask which science natural or social?) On the basis of this non-existence of race, we must accept that black and white people do not exist, all there is, are people. The DA proposes to empower the disadvantaged majority depending on a means test, rather than using racial metrics, thus, looking at the persons social position. This would include some white South Africans.

This puts broad-based black economic empowerment (BEE) to rest. The DAs criticism that BEE has not worked, instead, that it has served to enrich a connected elite and engenders corruption, is secondary. It is secondary because whatever the government has done in terms of the evolution of BEE policy, identifying loopholes and making efforts to broaden the benefits, really does not matter. The fact of the matter is that race does not exist.

At least on putting BEE to an end, the DA has something in common with the Black Like Me gentleman.

Individuals are important. We can see that in the history of the development of humankind. Ervin Laszlo, in his book The Consciousness Revolution says that its not individuality as such that is the problem but isolated individuality the individual seen as separate, even cut off, from society.

Margaret Thatcher, a political figure held in high regard in the DA, said there is no such thing as society all there is, are individuals and families.

If there is one important lesson to be drawn from the coronavirus pandemic, it is the rude awakening to the fact that we are social beings. We must find the right balance between individual rights and the collective good.

The United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) are quite attractive, as generalities often are. The SDGs are the chosen framework for the DAs economic policy, but the difficulty starts when things are taken to the level of specifics. The party proposes this framework, not only for the party but also for business. On empowerment, big business will look at the 17 SDGs and select where it thinks it would make the most social and economic impact true to individual freedom. The preference in public procurement will be for the company that makes the most impact on the SDGs as against black economic empowerment, so goes the logic.

This, it must be said, will certainly provide an escape for business from the specific and demanding conditions that the government attaches to its offerings to advance transformation. Think of the sector charters. Big business will really love it: there is no requirement for empowering historically disadvantaged people in the 17 SDGs.

There is also no connection between the DAs interpretation of the 17 SDGs in its economic policy priorities and what business would prioritise its up to business. If big business struggles to make a contribution to meaningful economic transformation even with legislated conditions that are meant to put pressure on business to change its behaviour, then what will be the outcome of the SDG model? Business leadership is most often occupied with the bottom line and return on investment to shareholders. Currently, the government is working on introducing mandatory employment equity targets for the private sector, given that relying on voluntary action has failed.

The problem with the DAs approach to empowerment and equity in which race is not a factor, is that, among others, given our history, if the black majority does not see itself in ownership and management in corporate SA, this creates a legitimacy crisis. This can be exploited by populist rhetoric with the potential for instability, which in turn is not good for business sustainability.

The DAs second commitment is equality of opportunity, which should not be mistaken for equality. I acknowledge the DA does not merely talk of all South Africans being given opportunity, but emphasises providing everyone with enablers, including quality education, health, and land reform, so as to be capable of taking the opportunities. In this regard, the role of the state is beyond Nozicks conception of an absolutely minimal role that the state provides safety and security, protects private property and enforces contracts the night watchman. The DAs conception of the state with its small government would be characterised as classical liberalism. According to the DA, to give meaning to freedom, equality of opportunity is critical.

Equality is more demanding and would in some respect subordinate individual freedoms. Classical liberalism takes the view that once all are given equality of opportunity from the start, there is nothing wrong with any inequalities that will inevitably arise, as long as those who get ahead have gained their wealth legitimately, ie, they have not stolen.

Michael Sandel in his book Justice: Whats the Right Thing To Do? says from a libertarian point of view, any intervention by the state to try and reduce economic inequalities by, for example, taxing the affluent to help the poor, is wrong. It amounts to coercion and is disrespectful of the right of individuals to choose what they want to do with their hard-earned money. If the affluent choose philanthropy, that is fine. Its voluntary.

Compassion, which is about concern and care for others, as one of the added values of the DA, comes across as an afterthought because it does not find expression in its policy proposals. Take the case of universal healthcare, which the DA thinks could be achieved without changing the basic structure of South Africas healthcare system.

There are some inconsistencies between the draft policies of the DA and the Constitution. Judge Dennis Davies in a recent lecture on social justice and economic inclusion characterised the South African Constitution as social-democratic, and some justices have referred to it as transformative.

The DA has some useful insights into the kind of state that it envisions in its first priority, but characterises the state as liberal again, true to its foundational commitments. In its whole society approach to addressing SAs socio-economic challenges, the party cites key stakeholders that will have to work together, and organised labour is left out. Whenever there is something to be said about workers in the document, it pertains to restricting their rights. This smacks of an attitude of suspicion and grudge towards the working class.

How do you talk of an inclusive economy in a modern democratic state without recognising the rights of workers, including collective bargaining? Judge Dennis Davies in the same lecture highlights the importance of rights of workers as enshrined in the Constitution.

The party declares its subscription to non-racialism. But its understanding of non-racialism in the South African context views non-racialism as irreconcilable with BEE and employment equity, and this is seriously problematic.

I have struggled to get a sense of the DAs macro-economic policy approach, that is, its fiscal and monetary policies. Equally, the document is silent on micro-economic policies, such as trade, industrial and competition policies. Maybe industrial policy is a swear word within the ranks of the DA, maybe its considered too much state intervention. Paradoxically, the DA in Parliament often pressurises the government to provide industrial support to both agriculture and manufacturing, for example, the sugar and steel industries.

It might be advisable for political parties, when thinking through economic policy, to take stock of the changes in the global political-economic environment, including the latest ideas about capitalism as an economic system, its limitations and excesses in changing times and appropriate responses, such as the idea of stakeholder capitalism.

The DAs idea of unbridled markets does not seem to take into account global developments and reality. There are new ways of thinking about the role of the state, including the concept of enterprising government. One of the leading political figures of the DA, who left the party a few years ago, described it as schizophrenic on matters of principle. In its draft policy document, the DA, diagnosing SAs economic problem, on the one hand accepts the apartheid legacy but on the other hand, is in denial on how to respond. Will the electorate be able to figure out what the DA really stands for on the economy?

Siyabulela Tsengiwe is former chief commissioner of the International Trade Administration Commission of South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity

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Vega rocket launching on return-to-flight mission tonight: Watch it live – Space.com

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Arianespace's Vega rocket is scheduled to fly tonight (Sept. 2) for the first time in more than a year.

The four-stage Vega last launched in July 2019, and that mission did not go well. The 98-foot-tall (30 meters) rocket's second-stage motor suffered an anomaly, resulting in the loss of the Vega and its payload, the United Arab Emirates' Falcon Eye 1 Earth-observation satellite.

But Vega is set to end its long spaceflight hiatus in grand style. The rocket's return-to-flight mission, which will deliver 53 satellites to orbit, is scheduled to launch tonight (Sept. 1) from the Guiana Space Center in South America at 9:51 p.m. EDT (10:51 p.m. local time; 0151 GMT on Sept. 3). You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of Arianespace, or directly via Arianespace on YouTube.

Related: Europe's Vega rocket in photos

Tonight's mission is known as both the Small Spacecraft Mission Service proof-of-concept flight and Flight VV16. It will loft into sun-synchronous orbit seven microsatellites that weigh between 33 lbs. and 330 lbs. (15 to 150 kilograms), as well 46 smaller cubesats.

The payloads, which represent 13 nations and 21 different customers, are intended for Earth observation, telecommunications, science, technology and education. All 53 satellites will be deployed by about 1 hour and 45 minutes after launch, if all goes according to plan.

Initially scheduled to launch on June 18, Flight VV16 has been delayed several times due to unfavorable wind conditions at the Guiana Space Center. The current launch window runs from tonight through Friday (Sept. 4), according to a statement from France-based Arianespace.

"With this mission, Arianespace is underscoring its comprehensive range of innovative and competitive services to address the nano- and microsatellite market sub-segment, serving both institutional and commercial needs," the statement reads.

Arianespace plans to launch more such rideshare missions using its next-generation launcher, Vega-C, which offers enhanced payload performance, company representatives said.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Commercial crews and private astronauts will boost International Space Station’s science – Space.com

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A golden age may be coming for human spaceflight research as more astronauts than ever fly to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard commercial crew vehicles and through private companies, NASA officials said during an online conference Thursday (Aug. 27).

"We're going to have more people on the International Space Station than we've had in a long time, and [research and development] throughput is actually going to increase," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in opening prerecorded remarks for the ISS Research & Development conference.

Bridenstine was referring to a new era of human spaceflight that opened on May 30, when SpaceX launched its first-ever crewed mission, the Demo-2 test flight. Demo-2 sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS for two months, ending on Aug. 2 when SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule made the first American ocean splashdown from orbit since 1975.

Related: SpaceX's historic Demo-2 test flight in photos

Demo-2 was made possible by more than a decade's worth of work across several presidential administrations. The goal was to spur the development of private American spaceships to fill the shoes of NASA's space shuttle fleet, which retired in 2011 after 30 years of service.

The space shuttle typically ferried crews of seven astronauts to and from the space station. Russian Soyuz spacecraft, the only orbital crewed vehicle available for the past nine years until Crew Dragon came online, can carry just three people at a time.

Crew Dragon and Boeing's delayed (but forthcoming) CST-100 Starliner capsule will carry four astronauts apiece on their operational ISS missions for NASA. (Both companies won multibillion contracts from NASA's Commercial Crew Program in 2014.)

This boost over the Soyuz crew size will expand crew research time during long missions to 70 hours a week, NASA ISS program manager Joel Montalbano said in another set of prerecorded remarks broadcast at the conference. (Montalbano did not say how many hours ISS crews of three to six people typically perform today).

"For commercial crew vehicles, we're continuing to work with the teams," Montalbano added, saying the agency is aiming for a "steady cadence" between SpaceX and Boeing to send astronauts to the space station to perform science and research.

The first operational SpaceX crewed mission is set to fly in late October, and NASA is accelerating crew announcements for future flights such as one this week in which it named astronaut Jeanette Epps to the first operational Boeing Starliner mission to the space station, which is expected to launch next year.

These crews will arrive on the space station seasoned via a couple of years of training per astronaut. They'll also have the benefit of knowledge accrued over the past 20 years, during which the ISS has been continuously staffed by rotating astronaut crews.

Kathy Lueders, NASA's newly appointed head of human spaceflight, said she remembered an early space station assembly flight (Flight 2A in 1998) being derailed for five hours as crew and ground control discussed how to address a broken treadmill piece, the treadmill being critical to keep astronauts healthy through exercise. "Today it would be a very short conversation," Lueders said in live remarks at the conference Thursday. "The crew would fix it and move on."

Related: The International Space Station inside and out (infographic)

Lueders pointed out that NASA is getting more comfortable with continuing challenging space station work even during test missions. During Demo-2, for example, ISS crewmembers participated in an ongoing set of battery replacements to upgrade power on the station. "In the past, we would have been avoiding that," she said.

Increased crew autonomy and increased crew sizes are two things buttressing the possibility of more ISS research. Private modules and crews are also on the horizon.

In January 2020, NASA selected the Houston company Axiom Space to build a private ISS module, with a target launch date of 2024. In June, Axiom selected Thales Alenia to build that new module, which will be designed to fly independently when the station program comes to an end.

Space Act proposals for private astronaut missions are ongoing, Angela Hart, NASA's low Earth orbit commercialization manager, said in live remarks at the conference. These private astronauts will be distinct from space tourists; a handful of people have paid millions of dollars each for brief stays on the ISS or the Soviet/Russian space station, Mir, which was deorbited in 2001. The new private astronauts, however, would presumably be employed by a company to perform private research, similar to the payload specialist position that used to be open to outsiders early in the space shuttle program.

NASA has received proposals from multiple companies, and two proposals are being reviewed, Hart said, without disclosing details on what the evaluation metrics are and which companies are being considered for the opportunity. (That said, Axiom and SpaceX jointly announced earlier this year that they aim to fly four private astronauts to the ISS as soon as 2021, for a 10-day mission.)

Hart added that the selected companies will have opportunities to fly up to twice per year, for short-duration missions of 10 to 30 days apiece. A typical space station stay for NASA astronauts and international crews is six months.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Up to three launches planned this weekend from Cape Canaveral – Spaceflight Now

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In this long exposure file photo from May 2019, a Falcon 9 rocket is seen streaking into space from Cape Canaveral, with its first stage booster returning to landing minutes later on a drone ship just offshore. Credit: SpaceX

Delays have set up the possibility of up to three rocket launches this weekend from different pads along Floridas Space Coast, including two SpaceX missions on Sunday that could set a company record for the shortest span between two Falcon 9 rocket launches.

But in the world of ever-changing launch schedules, numerous factors such as weather and technical issues could thwart launch plans this weekend.

The first in line is United Launch Alliances powerful Delta 4-Heavy rocket, which is scheduled to take off at 2:04 a.m. EDT (0604 GMT) Saturday from pad 37B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, which owns the U.S. governments fleet of clandestine spy satellites.

There is an 80 percent chance of good weather for launch of the Delta 4-Heavy Saturday, according to the U.S. Space Forces 45th Weather Squadron at Cape Canaveral. The publicly-released launch period extends until 6:25 a.m. EDT (1025 GMT), although the public period envelopes the actual launch window, which likely ends some time before then.

The Delta 4-Heavy was scheduled to blast off early Thursday, but ULA scrubbed the launch to evaluate an issue with a ground pneumatics system at the pad.

Due to the nature of its national security payload, the Delta 4-Heavy has priority on the U.S. militarys Eastern Range, which oversees safety, security and support functions for all launches originating from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the neighboring Kennedy Space Center.

The Delta 4-Heavy has three days reserved on the range, including Saturday and backup opportunities Sunday and Monday. Most commercial launches get two days at a time reserved on the range.

Assuming ULA gets the Delta 4 off the ground Saturday, SpaceX is gearing up for two launches as soon as Sunday, according to weather forecasts and hazard area information released by the Eastern Range.

Other sources also indicated the possibility of two SpaceX launches Sunday, but a company spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

First, a Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to take off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 10:12 a.m. EDT (1412 GMT) with the next batch of approximately 60 Starlink satellites for SpaceXs planned network to beam worldwide broadband Internet signals from space.

Around nine hours later, a different Falcon 9 rocket could launch from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at around 7:18 p.m. EDT (2318 GMT) with Argentinas SAOCOM 1B radar observation satellite.

SpaceX plans to land the first stage booster from the Starlink mission on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral. The first stage from the SAOCOM 1B mission is due to return to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for an onshore landing less than 10 minutes after liftoff.

Both launches will employ previously-flown Falcon 9 rocket boosters.

SpaceX plans to perform a test-firing of the Falcon 9 rocket for the Starlink mission Saturday on pad 39A. The company is not expected to conduct a test-firing of the rocket for the SAOCOM 1B mission.

As of Friday morning, both SpaceX launches remained on track for Sunday, but the weather forecast is iffy.

The official launch weather forecast for Sunday mornings Falcon 9 launch predicts a 50 percent chance of favorable weather, with considerable mid-level and high-level clouds expected over Floridas Space Coast, forecasters wrote Friday. The prime weather concern for the Falcon 9/Starlink mission is the potential of violating the thick cloud rule.

Theres just a 40 percent chance of acceptable weather predicted for launch of the SAOCOM 1B satellite Sunday evening, due to the threat of evening thunderstorms and associated cloudiness over the launch area, according to the 45th Weather Squadron.

If ULA and SpaceX rivals in the U.S. launch business pull off the feat of three launches this weekend, it will set a record for the shortest period in history with three orbital missions departing from Floridas Space Coast.

If they both take off as scheduled, the dual Falcon 9 launches planned Sunday would also make history. The last time Cape Canaveral hosted two orbital launches in a shorter period of time was Nov. 11, 1966, when an Atlas-Agena and a Titan 2 rocket launched just 99 minutes apart from different pads, according toa launch log maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks global satellite and launch activity.

The Atlas lofted the Agena target vehicle used for docking by the two-man Gemini 12 crew, which launched on the Titan 2 rocket the same day.

Speaking with reporters earlier this week, Brig. Gen. Doug Schiess commander of the 45th Space Wing which runs the Eastern Range said the range has shortened the time it needs to reconfigure between missions.

The launches are continuing to increase, Schiess said. Thats due in part to our national security space missions, and a huge part is our commercial missions.

We want to be a range thats resilient and reliable enough that any time anybody wants to launch, whether thats a national security payload, a civil payload with NASA, or a commercial payload, that were able to do that, Schiess said Tuesday.

At that time, the three launches all with unrelated payloads were planned a little more than 48 hours apart on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Those schedules quickly changed with further delays in all three missions.

While noting the launch manifest required some scheduling gymnastics, Schiess lauded the ranges partnership with ULA and SpaceX to help make it happen.

The advent of the autonomous flight termination systems, which would be activated to destroy a rocket if it flew off course, helps the range streamline operations required to support missions from Cape Canaveral. SpaceXs Falcon rocket family uses the automatic destruct systems, while ULAs Delta 4-Heavy uses an older flight termination system that requires a manual command to be sent from a control officer on the ground.

ULAs next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket will have the autonomous flight termination capability, which allows the range to support launches with smaller teams. The automated safety system also allows the range to accommodate more than one launch on the same day.

Before the introduction of the automated flight safety system and satellite-based GPS tracking, a network of tracking radars were required to monitor each rockets flight path to ensure it stayed within predefined corridors. Coupled with concerns over aging range infrastructure, that often required a minimum of two days between launches from Cape Canaveral in recent decades.

Autonomous flight safety systems allow us to be much faster at this, so as the new rockets come online from ULA and others that will have autonomous flight system (systems), that will allow us to be even better at this, Schiess said.

It really just comes down to a collaboration effort and the ability to schedule everything, change the network over, Schiess said. Thats also some of the things were doing for the range of the future, to build us an architecture that will change over much faster, plug and play with our telemetry, and things like that.

The SAOCOM 1B mission is noteworthy in another sense because it will be the first rocket launch from Cape Canaveral since 1969 to fly on a southerly course to deploy its payload into a high-inclination orbit the flies near Earths poles. The unusual trajectory will require the Falcon 9 rocket to first fly south-southeast from Cape Canaveral over the Atlantic Ocean, then bend its course back to the west in a right turn to skirt the coast of South Florida.

Known as a dogleg maneuver, the right turn will ensure the rockets impact point never crosses Florida in the event of an in-flight failure that causes the vehicle to crash back to Earth. The launcher will then head over the Florida Straits and Cuba before placing the SAOCOM 1B radar satellite into orbit.

Range safety officials began studying the southerly launch trajectory after a wildfire at Vandenberg Air Force Base where nearly all the U.S. launches into polar orbit originate threatened launch and payload processing facilities in 2016. SpaceX elected to use the polar launch trajectory from Cape Canaveral to allow the company to reduce staffing levels at Vandenberg during a period with few launches there, Gwynne Shotwell, companys president and chief operating officer, told reporters last year.

SAOCOM 1B was previously scheduled for launch in March, but Argentine officials called off the mission due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. Engineers placed SAOCOM 1B in storage at Cape Canaveral until early July, when engineers returned to Florida from Argentina to finish readying the spacecraft for liftoff.

The launch of SAOCOM 1B was again delayed from late July because the range was not available for the launch, according to SAOCOM 1B team members. Sources said the delay was likely caused by range safety and overflight concerns with the classified payload mounted on top of ULAs Delta 4-Heavy rocket at a neighboring launch pad.

The southerly trajectory required for the SAOCOM 1B mission will take the Falcon 9 rocket closer to the Delta 4 pad than for a typical launch toward the east.

Email the author.

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Up to three launches planned this weekend from Cape Canaveral - Spaceflight Now

It’s Tough to Get a Good Night’s Sleep in Outer Space – Medscape

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Shorter sleep duration, more wakefulness, and changes in the sleep cycle brought on by microgravity make it tough for astronauts to get a good night's sleep while they're in outer space, a new study shows.

In research that has implications for earthlings as well as astronauts, scientists found that the "significant sleep changes induced by the extreme environmental conditions of spaceflight can magnify and help reveal similar, though potentially less noticeable, changes that are induced by the more moderate conditions of Earth.

"Our results support other studies indicating that sleep architecture can adapt to different environments. Also, the sleep deficits that our subjects were facing while working around the clock in a high-pressure environment provide further evidence for the danger of stress and shift-work schedules for humans anywhere," study investigator Oliver Piltch, an undergraduate researcher at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in a release.

The findings were presented at Virtual SLEEP 2020, the 34th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The researchers studied sleep architecture in four cosmonauts and one astronaut before, during, and after missions to the Mir space station.

Using the NightCap sleep monitor, they recorded a total of 324 nights of sleep 112 pre-flight nights, 83 in-flight nights, and 61 post-flight nights.

Despite having the same "sleep opportunity" in space as on earth, the astronauts were on average sleeping an hour less each night during the space mission compared to when on earth before or after their mission (5.7 vs 6.7 hours; P < .0001).

In space, the astronauts also spent significantly more time awake in bed, leading to a 17.7% reduction in sleep efficiency.

Sleep architecture was also affected by spaceflight. In space, the time in nonrapid eye movement (nonREM) and REM sleep decreased by 14.1% and 25.8%, respectively. On average, it took about 90 minutes after falling asleep for astronauts to reach their first episode of REM sleep in space nearly 1.5 times longer than on earth.

"There were marked shifts in sleep architecture compared to baseline, and some of these evolved over the course of the mission," said Piltch.

"Our findings were consistent with previous studies that focus on the issue of sleep continuity. We found significant decreases in sleep efficiency during spaceflight despite similar times in bed," he noted.

Piltch said it's important to understand how sleep is affected by spaceflight in order to better equip astronauts for success on long-duration flights, such as a trip to Mars or the Moon.

He also pointed to a recent study in The Lancet Neurology that showed that 78% of the international space station crew take hypnotics on 52% of nights in space. "So it doesn't look like they sleep very well in space," he said.

Reached for comment, Camilo A. Ruiz, DO, medical director, Choice Physicians Sleep Center, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said the findings add to the "limited" data currently available on sleep in space and microgravity.

"To a certain point, the results of this study could have been expected, since sleep continuity and sleep architecture disruption is present during stressful periods of human life or in changes to the sleep rituals we hold dear, such as our beds and quiet bedrooms," said Ruiz, who was not involved in the study.

"The potential harm to astronauts from their sleep continuity and deranged sleep architecture is that the decreased alertness, performance, vigilance, and psychomotor skills they exhibit in that high-stakes environment such as space flight can lead to serious accidents that can jeopardize the safety of the crew and vessel," Ruiz noted.

"These research areas are on the forefront of space medicine that will allow mankind to lead successful interplanetary missions and colonization of these planets with long-term resident astronauts," he added.

The study was supported by funding from the Mary Gordon Roberts Fellowship, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Mental Health, the MacArthur Foundation Mind-Body Network, and Healthdyne Technologies. Piltch and Ruiz have no disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

SLEEP 2020: 34th Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies: Abstract 0278, presented August 28, 2020.

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It's Tough to Get a Good Night's Sleep in Outer Space - Medscape

SpaceX will launch 60 new Starlink satellites Thursday. Here’s how to watch live. – Space.com

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SpaceX plans to launch another big batch of its Starlink internet satellites on Thursday (Sept. 3), and you can watch the action live.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped with 60 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to lift off Thursday at 8:46 a.m. EDT (1246 GMT) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There's an 80% chance of good weather on launch day, according to the U.S. Space Force's 45th weather squadron.

You can watch the launch live here and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company. SpaceX's webcasts typically begin about 15 minutes before liftoff. The company also usually offers a separate livestream with mission control audio.

SpaceX has already launched about 600 satellites for Starlink, its burgeoning broadband constellation in low Earth orbit. And many more missions are in the offing; Elon Musk's company has permission to loft 12,000 Starlink satellites and has applied for approval to launch another 30,000 on top of that.

Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos

The spaceflight action on Thursday will be multilayered, as SpaceX will aim to land the first stage of the two-stage Falcon 9 on a "drone ship" in the Atlantic Ocean about 9 minutes after liftoff.

The company has also deployed one of its two net-equipped boats to recover the rocket's payload fairing, the two-piece protective nose cone that surrounds satellites during launch. It's unclear whether the net boat will aim to pluck a fairing half out of the sky or fish the equipment out of the sea.

SpaceX routinely lands and reflies Falcon 9 first stages, and the company has recently begun reusing payload fairings as well. Such reuse greatly reduces launch costs and turnaround times, Musk has said, and therefore has the potential to revolutionize spaceflight.

The Starlink launch was originally supposed to lead off a Falcon 9 doubleheader on Sunday (Aug. 30), with the second act being the evening liftoff of the SAOCOM-1B Earth-observation satellite. Bad weather scuttled Sunday morning's Starlink attempt, but the skies cleared enough for SAOCOM-1B to get off the ground nine hours later.

SpaceX then aimed to launch the Starlink satellites on Tuesday (Sept. 1) but pushed the mission back two more days to perform additional reviews.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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SpaceX will launch 60 new Starlink satellites Thursday. Here's how to watch live. - Space.com

There’s big demand among the high net worth for Virgin Galactic spaceflights, Cowen survey shows – CNBC

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Virgin Galactic's spacecraft Unity fires its rocket engine and heads to space on Feb. 22, 2019.

Virgin Galactic

A Cowen survey found that more than a third of high net worth individuals would be interested in paying fora Virgin Galactic flight, giving a sense of the demand for the company's space tourism service once it begins flying customers next year.

"Cowen's proprietary survey highlights a high level of interest among high-net-worth individuals to fly to space at a ticket price of $250k or above," analyst Oliver Chen said in a note to investors on Monday.

The firm estimated that Virgin Galactic's suborbital flights have a total addressable market of about 2.4 million people, among individuals with a net worth of more than $5 million. Of those individuals, Cowen's survey found that about 39% are interested in paying at least $250,000 for a ticket.

Virgin Galactic co-founder Sir Richard Branson, CEO George Whitesides and Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya pose together outside of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ahead of Virgin Galactic (SPCE) trading in New York, U.S., October 28, 2019.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Cowen noted that "Virgin Galactic will face supply constraints to serve all interested individuals, given the limited capacity to fly passengers." The company currently has one spacecraft flying and has announced plans to build as many as five more in the coming years, with two currently under construction. Each spacecraft can carry up to six passengers on a flight to the edge of space, in addition to the two pilots that fly it. Cowen estimated that, if Virgin Galactic builds 11 spacecraft by 2030, the company could "potentially fly ~3,400 passengers per year," with flights nearly every day.

"[Virgin Galactic] is uniquely positioned to benefit from the growing consumer interest toward luxury experiences, especially among high-net-worth individuals. We believe a substantial growth opportunity lies ahead with the commercial spaceflight business, which already has ~600 reservations," Chen said.

Shares of Virgin Galactic rose about 3% in trading from its previous close of $17.46.

Cowen began research coverage of Virgin Galactic on Monday, giving the stock an "outperform" rating and a $22 price target meaning the firm expects shares will rise 26% in the coming year. Virgin Galactic has two more test spaceflights it plans to conduct before flying founder Sir Richard Branson in the first quarter of 2021, which will market the opening of the company's commercial service.

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There's big demand among the high net worth for Virgin Galactic spaceflights, Cowen survey shows - CNBC

Six ways to buy a ticket to space in 2021 – Astronomy Magazine

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Jeff Bezos started his rocket company, Blue Origin, back in 2000. And hes been selling Amazon stock to pump billions of dollars into the effort ever since. Like SpaceX, theyre prioritizing reusable rockets and spacecraft that can drastically reduce the cost associated with spaceflight.

Much of Blue Origins effort has gone into developing a pair of rockets: New Shepard and New Glenn.

New Shepard can carry six people inside a suborbital capsule some 60 miles (100 km) into space. Blue Origin has already flown a dozen test flights, and theyre still planning several additional tests before launching passengers. However, in March, Axios reported that Blue Origin could send passengers into space in 2020, though COVID-19 has caused delays across the space industry. If the company can still get its space capsule tested in 2020, it could be on course for paid flights in 2021.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin has announced that it will soon start selling tickets. The companys website doesnt list the price of a Blue Origin trip, but Bezos has previously said their space tourists can expect to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly in its New Shepard capsule.

The company is also working hard on their New Glenn rocket, a heavy-lift, reusable launch vehicle that Blue Origin has already invested more than $2.5 billion into developing. Its larger than SpaceXs Falcon Heavy rocket, but smaller than the rocket planned with Starship. That size could eventually enable regular passenger trips into orbit and even beyond. The company will need that capacity, too. Blue Origins goal is to one day have millions of people living and working in space.

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Why the Space Force Must Use Navy Ranks – ClearanceJobs – ClearanceJobs

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Last month, Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas issued an amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, calling for the Space Force to use the same system and rank structure as is used in the Navy. This threw a monkey wrench in the nascent military branchs plans to formally announce its rank structure. Most likely, it was to be that of the Air Force, whose officer and enlisted ranks it already uses.

Then, in an op-ed published last week that engaged the broader public, William Shatner likewise called for Space Force naval ranks. There was no Colonel Kirk wrote the actor who portrayed the celebrated captain of the Enterprise. He added: not even in the mirror universe (which is what 2020 feels like at times). The piece is written with Shatnerian pizazz, and his argument rests on our shared cultural understanding of space exploration.

As I have written previously here at ClearanceJobs, the Space Force is a blank slate, and more than when the Air Force was stood up as a branch separate from the Army, every decision made now has lasting consequences for what a Space Force means as an entity. When it comes to far reaching service branches, the Space Force matters a lot. By forcing discussion of its rank structure, Crenshaw and Shatner seem to take a hundred-year view to a present-day problem.

(To learn how you can be a part of the Space Force, check out the Clearance Jobs roundup of jobs now, or soon to be, available.)

The U.S. Air Force was born of the Army Air Forces, which was essentially its own service branch within the Army. It had a distinct culture and ethos. The National Security Act of 1947 simply formalized something that was already fact. Officers like Henry Hap Arnold spent years thinking about American air power represented as its own service branch. Moreover, the urgency of organizing air power in World War II gave the AAF de facto autonomy within the War Department.

Two atomic bombs ended any argument over what an independent Air Forces job would be beyond supporting ground forces, and it took no time for the U.S. Air Force to come into its own.

The Space Force was born of Air Force Space Command for no apparent reason except the president wanted it. He wasnt the first to call for such a thing, of course: Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama proposed an independent space-branch of the armed forces, and when Donald Rumsfeld became defense secretary in 2000 , it was not because of the terrorist threat that manifested on 9/11. Rather, Rumsfeld had chaired a prominent commission that studied the ballistic missile threat to the United States.

Among the Rumsfeld Commissions key findings was that the U.S. military needed a space equivalent to its land-sea-air approach. Decades earlier, the commander of Air Force Systems Command gave a speech seeking to reframe the Space Race with the Soviet Union, essentially asserting that rather than a civilian endeavor, the DoD should lead the effort, both with robotic and crewed spacecraft.

Discussions are one thing, but turning notion into reality is another, and the Space Forcewhich is an inevitabilitywasnt quite ready to come out of the oven. Nobody is sure, exactly, why there is a Space Force. It has no unique service culture. (Individual MOSes in the Army have cultures more distinct than the entire Space Force branch has from the Air Force). It had no atomic bomb equivalent that punctuated the need for autonomy within the DoD and defined its mission going forward. It is doing exactly the same thing it was doing in 2018 as Air Force Space Command.

All the stuff that was supposed to come first didnt. So the decisions made now are the ones that will echo for decades and possibly centuries, which is what makes the Space Force so interesting. And there is one fundamental question that the Space Force needs to answer: is it going to put people up there?

Which is why ranks matter. In the military, culture is everything. If the Space Force chooses naval ranks for its servicemembers, it makes human spaceflightwhich, already, seems like an inevitability for the servicethat much more likely, and that much sooner. What would they do up there? Nobody knows! Historically, the DoD has planned everything from moon nuke bases to orbital spy stations, but computers have obviated the need for either.

Understandably, there is great trepidation at the notion of militarizing space. Space is already militarized in the most consequential way. Those intercontinental ballistic missiles, which rely on sub-orbital space flight, can wipe out all of humankind. The problem is that the U.S. government is not serious about civilian space exploration. Though its highly visible successes suggest some massive slice of the pie, NASA claims a mere one-half of one percent of the federal budget (about $22 billion total). Imagine what it could do with Air Force money (about $194 billion)?

Well, youll have to keep on imagining because its never going to happen. When Neil Armstrong pressed bootprints into the lunar surfacethe greatest triumph in human historyNASA was working with a meager 2.3% of the federal budget.

Meanwhile, as the Space Force matures, does anyone believe it will maintain a fixed budget of $15 billion? If in its first two years the Space Force commands over 60% of the NASA budget, what does the far horizon look like?

Civilian space exploration will benefit immeasurably from a robust, well-funded Space Force. The NASA administrator should pray every morning that Space Force gets a $100 billion dollarsbecause, again, that money is never going to NASA. Space Force research and development will lighten NASAs R&D burden, just as the Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s enabled NASAs Faster-Better-Cheaper program in the 1990s. If the Space Force, with a human spaceflight mindset, wants to spend big dollars on human-rated transports and landers, thats great! Let them develop the hardwarethe expensive part of space exploration.

DoD dollars funding R&D with NASA Mars applications might actually succeed in putting astronauts on the ground. (As the joke goes, we have always been 20 years from going to Mars.) And, look, the Space Force will be a part of such a high profile mission, which is not really an issue. The majority of astronauts are already members of the military. Exactly one civilian has walked on the moon, so its not like this is unprecedented. The Space Force can put one of its astronauts on the lander that carries the first Americans to Mars, the same way the Air Force would, without anyone blinking.

Is this the way we want to do things? Nope! We want to turn NASA into Starfleet. But is this the way the real world works? It sure is! On November 1, 2020, humanity will have known not a single day in twenty years without humans in space. But its long past time to up our numbers, and though circling the Earth for two decades is a great achievementthe greatest since Apolloits time to get those humans exploring the final frontier again.

DoD dollars with a Navy mindset will make that happen. Naval ranks are the easiest way to give the Space Force a culture it woefully lacks. Captains need vessels, after all, and admirals need fleets. God willing, the story of humankind is only beginning. Eventually, we might find a way to become multi-planetary. The Space Force with a Captain Kirk, rather than a Colonel Kirk, is our best chance to do it now.

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Why the sky is no limit for RAF’s space ambitions – Flightglobal

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In a lockdown summer of downbeat aviation news, it is perhaps fitting that a highlight was a model aeroplane in a windtunnel. In turbulent times for aerospace, that aircraft is even named after a storm. But in showing some detail of the external shape of the Tempest future fighter, BAE Systems has also emphasised the UKs determination to ride out the technological, financial and geopolitical hurricanes which are set to shape the national defence challenges of the next few decades.

Those late August images from BAEs Warton, Lancashire test facility reveal an external profile designed for stealth at Mach 2, to carry a wide range of payloads and to cope with the internal heat from enough onboard electric power to anticipate exotic technologies like laser directed-energy weapons.

Whatever capabilities Tempest may ultimately bring to the Royal Air Force (RAF) with its planned service entry in 2035, BAE stresses that operational advantage and freedom of action is not about a platform but, rather, a connected system of systems across the air domain but also including the land, sea, cyber and space, domains.

In short, the RAF and its allies can no longer say the sky is the limit; projecting power or defending home territory increasingly means sustaining operations in orbit.

But while deciding to bring space into the operational domain is one thing and in that the UK mirrors the USA and France, as well as NATO actually creating an effective force is another matter. Spelling out Britains response to this air and space power challenge in a milestone July 2019 address, then-UK secretary of state for defence Penny Mordaunt announced the transformation of the nations Joint Forces Command into a Strategic Command overseeing all five domains. And, she said, the UK would be the first US ally to join its Operation Olympic Defender, an initiative dating to 2013 to coordinate allies efforts to protect key satellites.

Mordaunt also unveiled a 30 million ($40 million) investment to launch a small satellite constellation within a year. Small satellites packing huge performance thanks to modern electronics but cheaper to launch or replace than traditional big-beast units will, she said: Eventually see live high resolution video beamed directly into the cockpit of our aircraft, providing pilots with unprecedented levels of battle awareness.

That live video from space concept stems from a demonstrator satellite called Carbonite-2, launched from India in 2018 and built by Airbus subsidiary Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL). The RAF contributed 4.5 million to that mission, and the concept morphed into an RAF-led project called Artemis, with SSTL, Airbus, Raytheon, the US government and launch provider Virgin Orbit as partners.

More than two years since the Carbonite-2 launch and a year-plus since Mordaunts spacepower speech, there is still no sign of that constellation. Much depends on Virgin Orbit, which is to bring its Boeing 747-based air launch system to Newquay airport in Cornwall for commercial and rapid-response RAF launches for example, to quickly replace orbiting assets lost to malicious interference or accidents.

The California-based Virgin Group subsidiary failed in its maiden attempt over the Pacific earlier this year and may soon make a second try but there is no prospect of a flight from the UK soon. In any case, there is as yet no Artemis hardware to fly.

The RAF tells FlightGlobal: Current work as part of the Artemis operational capability demonstrator includes studies into the use of responsive horizontal launch. SSTL adds that Artemis contracts were signed just before lockdown and work continues.

Whatever the timetable, what is not in question is the UKs determination to be an independent player in space and that militarisation of space is inevitable. As the RAF puts it: We take the protection of our space capability very seriously and have measures in place to protect our military assets. And, while the UK Space Agency provides a lead on space critical national infrastructure, the Ministry of Defence provides the necessary support to protect [that infrastructure] as required.

A more comprehensive view of the challenge comes from Will Whitehorn, the former head of Virgin Galactic and now president of the trade association UKspace. As Whitehorn observes, from navigation, television and communications to every bank transaction and someday perhaps to more ambitious services like carbon-free in-orbit power generation a modern society like the UK cannot function without space-based equipment. And inevitably, he notes: When you industrialise in space were going to have to defend those assets.

Or, as Paul Day Raytheon UKs representative to the UK and European space agencies and a 25-year RAF veteran puts it, there is no longer a distinction between the military and commercial sides of space. The UK, he says, should own and operate assets where sovereignty is an issue while creating a stable commercial sector, all with a focus on security and resilience.

So as the UK moves into space as an operational domain, says Day, the country should invest in several independent capabilities. One is to monitor space weather the solar storms, for example, that can interfere with electronics and another is the ground- and space-based radar and telescopes needed to track what is in orbit. Cyber hardening of the assets and communication links is also key and, he says, the UK should invest in communication and computation to rapidly put space-acquired data to operational use.

All of those functions, he adds, are vulnerable to interference either by deliberate act or the simple fact that low-Earth orbit is increasingly crowded: You have to protect the assets.

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UAH Leads $3.2M Solar Software Model Effort to Aid in Space Weather Predictions – HPCwire

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Sept. 2, 2020 The National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA have awarded $3.2 million over three years to development of open-source solar atmosphere and inner heliosphere software models useful to predict space weather, a project led by The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System, with a UAH professor as principal investigator.

We will develop an innovative, publicly available software that would make it possible to perform space weather simulations starting from the suns photosphere and extending to Earth orbit, says Dr. Nikolai Pogorelov, a distinguished professor in UAHs Department of Space Science and the UAH Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR).

It is one of seven projects awarded. The project team includes UAH, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (co-principal investigator Brian Van Straalen), Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC; co-principal investigator Charles N. Arge), Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC; co-principal investigator Ghee Fry), and two private companies, Predictive Science Inc. (co-principal investigator Jon Linker) and Space Systems Research Corp. (co-principal investigator Lisa Upton).

The fastest NASA and NSF supercomputers will be employed. Dr. Pogorelov is one 49 awardees nationwide to get NSF-approved 2020-2021 supercomputing time on Frontera, the fastest NSF supercomputer. Time on Frontera is awarded based on a projects need for very large-scale computing and the ability to efficiently use a supercomputer on the scale of Frontera.

This project is aimed to develop a new data-driven, time-dependent model of the solar corona and inner heliosphere to predict the solar winds properties at Earths orbit, he says.

This software will have a modular structure, which will make it possible for its users to modify the individual components when new observational data sets become available from emerging space missions and our knowledge of the physical processes governing solar wind acceleration and propagation improves.

In addition to the inner heliosphere model, the team will develop a new solar surface transport and potential field models to describe the solar atmosphere. That work will be done at Predictive Science Inc. and Space Systems Research Corp.

All our codes will be easily extensible for further development, Dr. Pogorelov says. We expect that our software will serve the heliospheric and space weather research communities for many years.

Space weather prediction

The effort focuses on the physical and computational aspects of software development but the team will use MSFCs expertise to develop operational codes and add some features designed to simplify space weather community efforts to create new operational tools to improve space weather predictions.

The development of successful numerical models and their application to space weather modeling strongly depends on the observational data used to run the codes, says Dr. Pogorelov. The expertise of GSFC and MSFC in data assimilation and analysis, and operational software design, will be of major importance for this project.

Dr. Pogorelov is the leading developer of the Multi-Scale Fluid-Kinetic Simulation Suite (MS-FLUKSS), which will be used as a basis of the new software. He will coordinate software development and ensure a proper level of synergy. He will also promote the inclusion of the codes in students class projects.

Together with Dr. Pogorelov and a to-be-hired postdoctoral researcher, CSPAR researchers and co-investigators Dr. Tae Kim and Dr. Mehmet Yalim will supervise simulations in the inner heliosphere and perform quantitative evaluation of the simulation results.

Accurate space weather forecasting is important to a high-tech Earth, Dr. Pogorelov says.

The solar wind emerging from the sun is the main driving mechanism of solar events, which may lead to geomagnetic storms that are the primary causes of space weather disturbances that affect the magnetic environment of Earth and may have hazardous effects on space-borne and ground-based technological systems, as well as human health, he says. For this reason, accurate modeling of the solar wind is a necessary part of space weather forecasting.

Structuring of the solar wind into fast and slow streams is the source of recurrent geomagnetic activity, Dr. Pogorelov says. The largest geomagnetic storms are caused by solar coronal disturbances called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that propagate through and interact with the solar wind.

The connection of the interplanetary magnetic field to CME-related shocks and impulsive solar flares determines where solar energetic particles propagate, he says. Data-driven modeling of stream interactions in the background solar wind and CMEs propagating through it are necessary parts of space weather forecasting.

Currently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Space Weather Prediction Center forecasts the state of the ambient solar wind and the arrival time of CMEs using an empirically-driven solar wind model.

The new models will provide more accurate solutions and will all be scalable on massively parallel systems, including Graphics Processor Units, he says.

In addition to improving space weather predictions at Earth, our developed models and software will be data driven. They will be based on the observational data and shed light onto physical processes occurring on the sun and in interplanetary space.

The research efforts will include conferences and training programs targeted to increase diversity and inclusion of under-represented groups, both inside the participating institutions and in the entire heliophysics community. Two users meetings will be organized at UAH, with up to 40 participants across the country.

The developed software will be promoted in classes and also through the US-Germany-South Africa Space Weather Summer Camp and NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) activity at UAH. Its advances will also be shared with the Alabama plasma physics community through the NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) led by Dr. Gary Zank, chair of UAHs Department of Space Science and CSPAR director.

The project led by Dr. Pogorelov is the culmination of more than a decade of extraordinarily wide-ranging research activities that CSPAR and the Department of Space Science researchers have been engaged in, ranging from the physics of the large-scale heliosphere to particle acceleration models for solar energetic particles, heating of the solar corona and detailed solar wind models, Dr. Zank says.

Dr. Pogorelovs project combines all these elements and takes the research to a new level of predictive capability, Dr. Zank says. This is a remarkably exciting decade for heliophysics research and its very exciting that CSPAR and UAH are very much at the center of it.

For the announcement and image, visit https://www.uah.edu/news/items/uah-leads-3-2-million-solar-software-model-effort-to-aid-in-space-weather-predictions

Source: Jim Steele, The University of Alabama in Huntsville

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BrainChip and VORAGO Technologies Agree to Collaborate through the Akida Early Access Program – Business Wire

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ALISO VIEJO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BrainChip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN), a leading provider of ultra-low power high performance AI technology, today announced that VORAGO Technologies has signed the Akida Early Access Program Agreement. The collaboration is intended to support a Phase I NASA program for a neuromorphic processor that meets spaceflight requirements. The BrainChip Early Access Program is available to a select group of customers that require early access to the Akida device, evaluation boards and dedicated support. The EAP agreement includes payments that are intended to offset the Companys expenses to support partner needs.

The Akida neuromorphic processor is uniquely suited for spaceflight and aerospace applications. The device is a complete neural processor and does not require an external CPU, memory or Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA). Reducing component count, size and power consumption are paramount concerns in spaceflight and aerospace applications. The level of integration and ultra-low power performance of Akida supports these critical criteria. Additionally, Akida provides incremental learning. With incremental learning, new classifiers can be added to the network without retraining the entire network. The benefit in spaceflight and aerospace applications is significant as real-time local incremental learning allows continuous operation when new discoveries or circumstances occur.

VORAGO Technologies is a privately held, high technology company based in Austin, Texas with over 15 years of experience in providing radiation-hardened and extreme-temperature solutions for the Hi-reliability marketplace, and recognized as one of Inc 5000s Fastest Growing Private Companies in America. VORAGOs patented HARDSIL technology uses cost-effective high-volume manufacturing to harden any commercially designed semiconductor component for extreme environment operation, and has created a number of solutions throughout Aerospace, Defense and Industrial applications. VORAGO Technologies opens up a new world of possibilities for customer designs, no matter how hostile the environment. http://www.voragotech.com

Louis DiNardo, BrainChip CEO commented, We are both excited and proud to participate in this Phase I program with VORAGO Technologies and support NASAs desire to leverage neuromorphic computing in spaceflight applications. The combination of benefits from the Akida neuromorphic processor and a radiation-hardened process brings significant new capabilities to spaceflight and aerospace applications.

Bernd Lienhard, VORAGO CEO added, We are thrilled and honored to partner with BrainChip to harness the radiation hardening capabilities of our patented HARDSIL technology for the Phase I program with NASA. Our ongoing mission of creating components with increased availability and unmatched solutions in aerospace and defense applications paired with the Akida neuromorphic processor will create unprecedented standards moving forward in the industry.

About Brainchip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN)

BrainChip is a global technology company that is producing a groundbreaking neuromorphic processor that brings artificial intelligence to the edge in a way that is beyond the capabilities of other products. The chip is high performance, small, ultra-low power and enables a wide array of edge capabilities that include on-chip training, learning and inference. The event-based neural network processor is inspired by the spiking nature of the human brain and is implemented in an industry standard digital process. By mimicking brain processing BrainChip has pioneered a processing architecture, called Akida, which is both scalable and flexible to address the requirements in edge devices. At the edge, sensor inputs are analyzed at the point of acquisition rather than through transmission via the cloud to a data center. Akida is designed to provide a complete ultra-low power and fast AI Edge Network for vision, audio, olfactory and smart transducer applications. The reduction in system latency provides faster response and a more power efficient system that can reduce the large carbon footprint of data centers.

About VORAGO

VORAGO Technologies is a privately held, high technology company based in Austin, Texas with over 15 years of experience in providing radiation-hardened and extreme-temperature solutions for the Hi-rel marketplace. VORAGO's patented HARDSIL technology uses cost-effective high-volume manufacturing to harden any commercially designed semiconductor component for extreme environment operation, and has created a number of solutions throughout Aerospace, Defense and Industrial applications. VORAGO Technologies opens up a new world of possibilities for your designs, no matter how hostile the environment. http://www.voragotech.com

Additional information is available at https://www.brainchipinc.com

Follow BrainChip on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/BrainChip_inc Follow BrainChip on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/7792006

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Astronomers Claim to Have Spotted the Most Massive Black Hole Merger Ever – Futurism

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A team of astronomers have spotted what they claim is the most massive collision of two black holes ever observed.

Prior to the gigantic collision, at least one of the massive colossal space objects had the mass of 85 Suns. The collision itself created a black hole about 150 solar masses putting it into a mass range previously thought to be possible and ejected the equivalent of eight solar masses in the form of energy in the form of gravitational waves, as detailed in papers published today in the journals Physical Review LettersandThe Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Everything about this discovery is mindboggling, Simon Portegies Zwart, a computational astrophysicist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research, said in a Nature statement.

The size of the black holes involved in the merger would make them more massive than a regular star, but lighter than the supermassive black holes often found at the center of galaxies.

The event, which occurred approximately seven billion light years away, was observed in May 2019 using the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Antenna (LIGO) detectors in the US and the smaller Virgo observatory in Italy.

Theresearchers made the discovery by observing gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that can give away these galactic events. The relatively new technique has allowed scientists to make discoveries of dozens of other black hole collisions like it.

But even by the epic standards of black hole collisions, this one takes the cake.

This doesnt look much like a chirp, which is what we typically detect, Virgo member Nelson Christensen, researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who compared the new results to the first detection of gravitational waves using LIGO dating back to 2015, said in an MIT press release.

This is more like something that goes bang, and its the most massive signal LIGO and Virgo have seen, Christensen added.

The masses of the two merging black holes are highly unusual as there is a mass gap, roughly between 65 and 135 solar masses, where black holes arent expected to exist. Thats because at those sizes, stars theoretically tend to be ripped apart and disintegrated by the explosive fusion of oxygen nuclei, a process known as pair instability.

This is quite neatly in the range one would expect the pair-instability mass gap should be, LIGO astrophysicist Christopher Berry of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said in the Nature statement.

Scientists suspect that at least one of the black holes may not have formed from a collapsing star the more conventional way smaller black holes are formed.

Another scenario is that smaller black holes could have merged together over time, accumulating into the one involved in this collision. Yet such a theory is hard to back up as we still havent found any other intermediate black holes.

Thats why astronomers have been looking for these extensively, because they would help in solving this puzzle, Salvatore Vitale, an assistant professor at the LIGO Lab of MIT, told The Verge.

LIGO once again surprises us not just with the detection of black holes in sizes that are difficult to explain, but doing it using techniques that were not designed specifically for stellar mergers, Pedro Marronetti, program director for gravitational physics at the National Science Foundation, said in the MIT press release.

This is of tremendous importance since it showcases the instruments ability to detect signals from completely unforeseen astrophysical events, he added. LIGO shows that it can also observe the unexpected.

READ MORE: Astronomers say theyve detected the most massive merger of two black holes ever discovered [The Verge]

More on black holes: Cornell Scientists Say Strange Metals Are Similar to Black Holes

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Astronomers Claim to Have Spotted the Most Massive Black Hole Merger Ever - Futurism

Research: LSD Microdoses as Effective as Opioids at Treating Pain – Futurism

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According to new research, tiny doses of the psychedelic drug LSD could be an effective painkiller perhaps as powerful, the scientists found, as conventional opioids like morphine.

This study in healthy volunteers shows that a low dose of LSD produces an analgesic effect in the absence of a psychedelic effect, as assessed with a cold pressure tests, said lead researcher Jan Ramaekers, a professor of psychoparmacology and behavioral toxicology at Maastricht University, in a press release. The magnitude of the analgesic effect appears comparable to analgesic effects of opioids in the same pain model.

As described in research published this week in theJournal of Psychopharmacology, Ramaekers and his colleagues gave either placebos or microdoses of LSD between five and 20 micrograms, compared to the 100 micrograms or more you might find in a recreational dose to 24 volunteers.

Then they administered something called a cold pressor test, in which the subjects were asked to submerge a hand in a tub of water that had been chilled to near-freezing.

What they found was striking. The very low doses of LSD didnt seem to have much of an effect on participants perception of pain, but the 20 microgram dose appeared to decrease participants perception of pain by a substantial 20 percent.

Amanda Feilding, the Director of the Beckley Foundation, which assisted with the research, expressed enthusiasm for the results.

The present data suggests low doses of LSD could constitute a useful pain management treatment option that is not only effective in patients but is also devoid of the problematic consequences associated with current mainstay drugs, such as opioids, she said in the press release. Over 16 million people worldwide are currently suffering from Opioid Use Disorder and many more will become hooked as a result of oversubscription of pain medication.

The research, is still early stage, and Ramaekers called for further trials to see if the findings can be replicated. But its intriguing, New Atlas points out, because it builds on much earlier findings from the 1960s, when a researcher named Eric Kast conducted a series of promising experiments designed to probe whether LSD might be an effective pain medication.

That work was cut short when the government cracked down on LSD research. But now, with authorities starting to loosen those restrictions, scientists like Ramaekers are interested in following up.

These findings strongly encourage clinical trials in pain patients to assess the replicability and generalizability of these findings, Ramaekers said in the release.

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