COVID Metrics
	Today	Week Ago	Goal
Percent fully Vaccinated	54.4%	53.6%	≥70.0%¹
Fully Vaccinated (millions)	180.6	177.9	≥232¹
New Cases per Day³🚩	142,736	139,221	≤5,000²
Hospitalized³	88,506	93,097	≤3,000²
Deaths per Day³🚩	1,464	1,253	≤50²
¹ Minimum to achieve "herd immunity" (estimated between 70% and 85%). ²my goals to stop daily posts, ³7 day average for Cases, Currently Hospitalized, and Deaths 🚩 Increasing 7 day average week-over-week for Cases, Hospitalized, and Deaths ✅ Goal met.

	Merrill	Goldman	GDPNow
7/30/21	7.0%	9.0%	6.1%
8/20/21	4.5%	5.5%	6.1%
9/10/21	4.5%	3.5%	3.7%
9/17/21	4.5%	4.5%	3.6%

COVID Metrics
	Today	Week Ago	Goal
Percent fully Vaccinated	54.2%	53.4%	≥70.0%¹
Fully Vaccinated (millions)	180.1	177.4	≥232¹
New Cases per Day³🚩	146,182	137,783	≤5,000²
Hospitalized³	89,132	93,255	≤3,000²
Deaths per Day³🚩	1,233	1,447	≤50²
¹ Minimum to achieve "herd immunity" (estimated between 70% and 85%). ²my goals to stop daily posts, ³7 day average for Cases, Currently Hospitalized, and Deaths 🚩 Increasing 7 day average week-over-week for Cases, Hospitalized, and Deaths ✅ Goal met.

A Falcon 9 rocket streaks into orbit Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center, kicking off the Inspiration4 mission. Credit: Michael Cain / Spaceflight Now / Coldlife Photography

With the backing of a billionaire businessman, four private citizens blasted off Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a first-of-its-kind fully commercial three-day spaceflight aboard a SpaceX crew capsule, riding to an altitude higher than any person has flown in two decades.

The Inspiration4 mission includes a wealthy entrepreneur with a penchant for aerobatic flying, a science educator with a lifelong ambition to fly in space, a physician assistant who survived childhood cancer, and an Air Force veteran turned data engineer.

A Falcon 9 rocket lit up Florida’s Space Coast with a roaring liftoff from pad 39A at Kennedy at 8:02:56 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0002:56 GMT Thursday). The launch kicked off SpaceX’s fourth-ever crew mission to low Earth orbit, but the first without any NASA astronauts on-board.

Within about a minute, the 215-foot-tall (65-meter) Falcon 9 was traveling faster than the speed of sound, trailing a flickering orange flame as nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines powered the launcher through a clear evening sky.

Two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s reusable first stage booster shut down and dropped away to descend to landing on a SpaceX recovery ship positioned downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. Moments later, the second stage’s single engine ignited to send the Crew Dragon capsule into orbit.

SpaceX, founded and led by Elon Musk, hailed the mission as a turning point in the history of spaceflight. The Inspiration4 mission follows suborbital commercial launches space in July by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, space companies established by billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.

Branson and Bezos flew on their own spaceships, but they barely scraped the boundary of space.

Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane reached an altitude of about 53 miles (86 kilometers), above the U.S. government’s definition of where space begins, giving Branson and his five crewmates a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to a runway landing in New Mexico.

Bezos launched to a higher altitude — 66 miles (107 kilometers) — above the internationally-recognized edge of space. Like Branson, Bezos and three other passengers floated in their New Shepard spacecraft for several minutes before Earth’s gravity pulled them back to the ground.

Liftoff of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on the Inspiration4 mission, opening a new era in human spaceflight with the launch off the first all-private crew to orbit. https://t.co/K03ErG8ZHF pic.twitter.com/e1IwQ0csRE

— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) September 16, 2021

The Inspiration4 crew is commanded by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, 38, who paid SpaceX to charter the four-seat Crew Dragon spacecraft for three days in orbit. He’s joined by Sian Proctor, 51, a professor at an Arizona community college who serves as the mission’s pilot.

The other crew members are Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old data engineer from the Seattle area who works for Lockheed Martin.

The mission is fully automated, but the Inspiration4 crew — all new to spaceflight — trained for six months to prepare for living in space. The crew could intervene and execute emergency commands if something goes wrong during the flight.

Isaacman’s crew blazed through the 66-mile altitude reached by Bezos’s suborbital mission just three minutes after blastoff from Florida. They kept going.

The Falcon 9 rocket accelerated the Crew Dragon capsule to a speed of some 17,000 mph (27,400 kilometers per hour) to reach orbital velocity. That’s equivalent to traveling 5 miles every second.

That speed will keep the spacecraft in space for three days, when the Inspiration4 mission will come back to Earth. Weather permitting, splashdown off the coast of Florida is scheduled around 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) Saturday.

“Few have come before, and many are about to follow,” Isaacman said moments after reaching orbit. “The door is opening now. It’s pretty incredible.”

Flying over the North Atlantic, the Crew Dragon capsule deployed from the Falcon 9’s upper stage about 12 minutes after liftoff. A few minutes later, the ship’s nose cone unlatched and opened, revealing a new three-layer plexiglass dome window, or cupola, flying in space for the first time on the Inspiration4 mission.

The cupola replaces the docking port used Dragon flights to the International Space Station. The Inspiration4 mission will travel solo, without linking up with the station, and the cupola will offer the Isaacman and crew panoramic views of the planet from space.

The crew will access the cupola by opening the spacecraft’s forward hatch.

SpaceX has fitted the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft with a plexiglass “cupola” viewing window for the Inspiration4 mission.

The clear dome takes the place of the Dragon docking port used for missions to the International Space Station.https://t.co/K03ErG8ZHF pic.twitter.com/pkamdLdsQV

— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) September 15, 2021

A pair of post-launch “phasing” burns using the spacecraft’s Draco thrusters Wednesday night adjusted the ship’s orbit from an elongated shape to a more circular path around Earth. SpaceX said the orbit’s altitude is at 363 miles (585 kilometers), a record for a Dragon spacecraft.

Inspiration4 is orbiting above the altitude of the International Space Station, and higher than any humans have flown in some two decades, since a space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Isaacman conceived of the Inspiration4 mission last year, in part, to raise money and awareness for St. Jude. An experienced civilian pilot in fighter jets, Isaacman established four pillars, or values, for the mission, with each seat representing one pillar.

“We set out from the start to deliver a very inspiring message about what can be done up in in space and the possibilities there, but also what we can accomplish here on Earth,” Isaacman said in a press conference before launch.

Isaacman said he chose four mission pillars — leadership, hope, prosperity, and generosity — “to assemble a very inspiring crew, who all have so many amazing qualities and contribute so many interesting firsts of this mission.

“And we also chose to do it through the largest fundraising effort in the history of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, acknowledging the real responsibilities we have here on Earth, in order to earn the right to make progress up in space,” said Isaacman, who took the commander’s seat on the mission to represent leadership.

Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman, and Hayley Arceneaux pose in their SpaceX pressure suits before launch Wednesday. Credit: Inspiration4 / John Kraus

Isaacman donated $100 million to St. Jude, and started a fundraising effort linked to the Inspiration4 mission to try to raise $100 million more.

Fewer than 600 people have flown in space, and most have been professional astronauts or cosmonauts employed by a government agency. A handful of “space tourists” have flown into orbit, but all launched on spacecraft commanded by a professional astronaut.

Arceneaux, who works at St. Jude, was selected as part of the mission’s “hope” pillar. As a child, she was a patient at the medical center after her diagnosis with bone cancer.

She became the youngest American to fly in orbit, and the first person with a prosthetic body part to go to space.

Proctor, the fourth Black woman to fly in space, was selected in a competition for the “prosperity” seat on Inspiration4. She used Shift4 Payments, a company bounded by Isaacman, to promote sales of her art and poetry, and submitted a Twitter video for consideration to be a part of the mission.

Sembroski entered a lottery for the “generosity” seat by donating to St. Jude. A college friend won the sweepstakes, but passed on the seat and offered it to Sembroski.

Former first lady Michelle Obama, who spoke with the Inspiration4 crew by phone earlier this week, tweeted Wednesday night that the crew is “inspiring us all with their courage, curiosity, and passion.”

“I’m thinking of all the young people who’ll be looking up to this crew and dreaming big thanks to them. Ad astra!”

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket climbs off pad 39A to begin the Inspiration4 mission. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX ended its live coverage of the Inspiration4 launch shortly after the mission reached orbit. The company plans no continuous video coverage of the flight, as NASA does with Dragon missions to the space station, but there are several live events in the flight plan, according to Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Inspiration4’s mission manager.

The in-flight events include a discussion with patients and staff at St. Jude, plus a few more “surprises,” Poteet told Spaceflight Now.

The mission schedule is planned to the minute, Poteet said. The crew will participate in several biomedical experiments before, during, and after their three-day spaceflight.

“I’m so excited about the medical research that we’re going to be doing on this flight,” Arceneaux said. “We’re going to be collecting a lot of swabs to learn about the microbiome, how that changes in flight. We’re going to be performing ultrasounds to evaluate for fluid shifts, as well as performing some cognitive tests, and studying radiation effects of going to our high altitude.”

The crew will also record personal messages for supporters and capture video for a Netflix documentary about the mission. Some of the footage will be debuted in a finale for the documentary miniseries to be released Sept. 30.

The capsule is carry personal mementos, plus up to 70 pounds of hops to be auctioned off to a brewery after the flight, with the money going to St. Jude.

The Crew Dragon will splash down at one of seven return zones off the coast of Florida, either in the Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic coast. SpaceX will establish a primary return area around 24 hours before the homecoming, based on forecasts of weather and sea conditions.

SpaceX’s recovery team will be on standby to pull the capsule from the ocean and help the crew exit the spacecraft. The crew members will fly back to Kennedy Space Center by helicopter.

The Inspiration4 mission is an all-commercial affair that leaves NASA largely on the sidelines. That’s just fine with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

“It’s another opening up of space,” Nelson said Tuesday during the Humans To Mars Summit. “In this particular one, other than the fact that the spacecraft, in this case the Dragon spacecraft, was built under the auspices of NASA because of the safety of astronauts. But other than that … This is SpaceX’s deal.

“NASA is not involved in it because this is a totally commercial operation of which they are not touching or, in this case, docking with the International Space Station,” Nelson said.

Private spaceflight will become the norm, if NASA gets its way. The space agency has turned over astronaut transportation to low Earth orbit to the private sector, through contracts with SpaceX and Boeing, and eventually wants a commercial space station to replace the International Space Station.

“It’s another example of where we’d like to go in low Earth orbit eventually,” Nelson said. “We want to keep the International Space Station going until 2030, and then we want to phase that out. We want commercial operations to take over low Earth orbit. We want them to do the manufacturing. We want them to have their own space station, so that NASA can continue to push outward into the solar system, and beyond.”

Under that scenario, NASA, international space agencies, companies, and private citizens would be able to purchase rides to a commercial space station. That frees governments from the cost burden of building and operating an orbiting complex, allowing NASA to spend its resources on deep space exploration, such as missions to the moon and Mars.

A NASA spokesperson said SpaceX is paying NASA around $1 million for limited support of the Inspiration4 mission.

The space agency’s support includes communications links with the Crew Dragon capsule through ground stations and NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, a network of satellites in geostationary orbit also used to communicate with the space station.

Before Inspiration4, SpaceX had launched four Crew Dragon missions to date, all under contract to NASA. Three of the previous missions carried astronauts to the space station.

NASA awarded $6.8 billion in contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to complete development of new commercial crew capsules. SpaceX got $2.6 billion in government funding to design and build the human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft, and Boeing received a similar $4.2 billion deal for its Starliner spacecraft.

Both programs ran into delays, but SpaceX launched its first astronaut mission for NASA in May 2020, ending a nearly nine-year gap in U.S. orbital crew launches since the retirement of the space shuttle.

Boeing’s Starliner program, on the other hand, still has not flown into space with a crew.

Isaacman said before launch that SpaceX’s track record and process “inspires a lot of confidence for us.”

“Any jitters are the good kind,” Arceneaux said. “I’m just so excited for tomorrow to get here.”

The Inspiration4 crew poses with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, moments before riding the elevator to board the Crew Dragon capsule Wednesday. Credit: Inspiration4 / John Kraus

Benji Reed, director of SpaceX’s human spaceflight programs, said the Inspiration4 crew completed “many months” and “hundreds of hours” of training at SpaceX locations across the country.

“They’ve been doing all kinds of training,” Reed said Tuesday. “They’ve studied over 90 different kinds of training guides and manuals and lessons to learn how to fly the fly the Dragon, and what to do in emergency situations. They’ve done their own kinds of preparations, a zero-G flight, they’ve climbed Mount Rainier together. And they’ve done a lot of jet fighter flights.”

SpaceX’s training included 12-hour and 30-hour simulations in a mock-up of a Crew Dragon spacecraft at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The simulations, or sims, tested the crew’s response to emergencies and to living in isolation on the Dragon capsule.

“We’re happy to say that this crew and our operations team (are) ready and certified, and ready to fly,” Reed said.

Reed said SpaceX’s corporate mission to extend human life to other planets requires “putting millions of people in space one day.”

“So the long term vision is its spaceflight becomes airline-like, right?” he said. “You can buy a ticket, and you go. But right now, the appropriate thing is that we still train people significantly.”

SpaceX has other private crew missions on the books, beginning with the launch of another four-person team on a Dragon spacecraft in early 2022. On that mission, sponsored by the Houston-based company Axiom Space, the Dragon spacecraft will dock with the space station, and the private astronauts will spend about a week living and working there under an arrangement with NASA.

There are also more dedicated NASA flights with SpaceX’s fleet Crew Dragon capsules. SpaceX’s next NASA crew flight is set for launch Oct. 31 from Kennedy Space Center to kick off a six-month expedition to the space station.

“As we look for ways to evolve toward that airline-like model, we’ll look for how we can cut back on the amount of training that’s necessary to ensure safety,” Reed said.

“The reality is that the Dragon manifest is getting busier by the moment,” Reed said. “We’re gearing up to fly three, four, five, six times a year, at least.”

Email the author.

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

COVID Metrics
	Today	Week Ago	Goal
Percent fully Vaccinated	54.1%	53.3%	≥70.0%¹
Fully Vaccinated (millions)	179.7	177.1	≥232¹
New Cases per Day³🚩	145,675	141,275	≤5,000²
Hospitalized³	90,593	93,243	≤3,000²
Deaths per Day³🚩	1,358	1,125	≤50²
¹ Minimum to achieve "herd immunity" (estimated between 70% and 85%). ²my goals to stop daily posts, ³7 day average for Cases, Currently Hospitalized, and Deaths 🚩 Increasing 7 day average week-over-week for Cases, Hospitalized, and Deaths ✅ Goal met.

Getting Out Facts and Making Sure Voters Cast Ballots Beats Trumpism

The overwhelming failure in the recall of California Gov. Gavin Newsom should send a powerful message to those Republicans who think their future lies with Donald Trump and Trumpism. It doesn’t.

By any measure, the vote to retain Newsom was a landslide. Almost 64% of voters cast ballots against recalling Newsom.

That’s better than the record margin by which Newsom won in 2018. He won that race with just under 62% of the vote. It also equals the share of California votes for Biden against Trump in 2020.

Trumpers are a slowly dwindling minority… Many are as closed-minded as the Taliban.

The recall vote is a clear repudiation of the Trumpian tactic of trying to disrupt and delegitimize government when anyone but a Trumper wins the popular vote. Havoc will continue, but it can be defeated – always — if enough sensible Americans cast ballots.

Trumpism isn’t dead, not yet. But it’s not attracting new adherents, either. That’s because all it offers is anger, the lethal rejection of medical science and cultish devotion to a deeply disturbed con artist who just makes stuff up like his very recent delusional claim of being rescued on 9/11 by two firefighters.

Trumpism is not an ideology, just political masturbation.

And no one in America is more captured by self-love than Donald Trump.

General elections, especially when the presidency is on the ballot, draw far more voters than special elections. That’s why the Republican Party has long relied on them to put its people in office. The GOP simply does better at turning out the vote than the Democrats, or at least it did until 2020.

In spring, it looked like Newsom could become the third governor in American history to be recalled because rank-and-file Democrats weren’t paying attention. Neither were the independents, whose numbers equal those of Republicans in California.

Newsom had loaded himself up with political baggage in the way he handled the worst of the Covid pandemic. His public health emergency order last fall imposed mask and indoor activities limits that infuriated not just the freedumb crowd but some struggling small business owners.

In an act of maddening arrogance and political stupidity, the governor enjoyed dinner in a Napa Valley French restaurant without a mask. He violated other Covid protocols as well. And he got photographed.

“Do as I say and not as I do” has ended the careers of more than a few politicians, yet Newsom is coming out of the recall much stronger than ever.

Newsom got lucky, but that stroke of political luck contains a valuable lesson for defeating Trumpism.

The leading candidate to succeed Newsom if the recall worked was Larry Elder, a deranged Trumper radio talk show host. Elder made clear the recall was a referendum on Trumpism, a novice political move that professional Democrats exploited fully.

Under California’s century-old populist recall rules, a small minority can force an election. Then if 50% plus one voter favor recall, the new governor is whomever gets the most votes the same day. That could, literally, be someone who earns less than 10% of the vote. Elder polled at about 18% but won 45% of the vote in a field of almost 50 gubernatorial wannabes. Still, Elder secured far fewer votes than the number of votes favoring recall.

Let us hope the populist California recall, initiative and referendum rules will get modernized to make putting items on the ballot harder.

There is a lesson in what happened between June and Sept. 14.

Elder is a longtime fixture in the Los Angeles radio market, a robust marketplace of music, news, ideas and nonsense.

A true-red Trumper, Elder spouts crazy, illogical, half-baked, fact-free, absurd and downright offensive ideas, sometimes contradicting himself just like his hero does.

After Elder complained that Los Angeles Times never reviewed his books, the paper obliged. The devastating result is an object lesson in being careful what you wish for because it may come true. Wrote reviewer David L. Ulin after reading four of Elder’s seven books:

Elder is not a writer but a brand. As such, he is always on brand, regardless of the issue: the economy, the unhoused, law enforcement, immigration rights. His columns represent not so much a voice in conversation as a series of diatribes. When it comes to public policy, Elder offers neither subtlety nor nuance, not least because that isn’t what his audience wants.

Facts are to Elder just as they are to Trump: They don’t matter. Like Trump, Elder creates his own reality.

That goes over well among the American Taliban and their uncouth cousins, the American Yahoos. California is not poor Alabama or Mississippi or home to Covidiocy leaders as in Texas and Florida.

California, where I grew up and lived for 36 years, is rich. It would boast Earth’s fifth-biggest economy if it were a nation because of education and science.

Be it growing strawberries year-round, making movies or splicing genes, California’s economy is science-driven. Trumpism rejects science as it preys on the minds of people who didn’t pay attention in high school and couldn’t explain the function of RNA if their lives depended on it. Among Trumpers, it’s OK, indeed more than OK, to be ignorant.

Elder promotes some wildly crazy ideas. He proposed reparations for slave owners because their “property” was taken away by President Abraham Lincoln. He also said he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

By the way, Elder is Black.

On the day before the recall vote ended, Elder posted on his website assertions that the recall vote results were fraud and statistical analysis proved that.

That’s a remarkable claim to make before any vote results are known and before the election ends. But it’s consistent with the Trumpism practice of just making stuff up. The week before the election, Trump said the election was rigged for Newsom. He reiterated that on election day.

Elder’s campaign also made clear that he intended to govern California in pure Trumpian style, by tweet rather than substance. That also alarmed voters in a state whose economy is heavily based on science.

Most Californians had never heard of Elder before the recall. Only when Democratic strategists started to get out the word about what a crazy loon Elder is, Democrats, independents and those Republicans not infected with Trumpism began mailing in their ballots in large numbers.

The lesson: Who votes is all that matters in elections.

Trumpers are a slowly dwindling minority. As a class, they don’t understand how the world works, don’t embrace logic, think they are smarter than the scientists they denounce, embrace stupidity and incompetence [see Dunning-Krueger Effect] and are easily taken in by slogans rather than substance. Many are as closed-minded as the Taliban.

Those people love Trump because he freed the inner racism of the Republican Party, which has always been there. Witness opposition to civil rights and voting rights. Trump told his followers that it was OK to use racial slurs and that violently attacking those you disagree with meant you were “fine people.”

The insurmountable problem for Republicans – unless they steal elections – is that white supremacy continues to slowly fade despite its vicious public displays during the brief Trump era. That’s because humans evolved toward cooperation, not Trump’s Hobbesian notions of brutal power abused to make life nasty, brutish and short for the many.

The lesson about building a better America is that to defeat Trumpism its opponents must make sure they get out the story of who Trumper candidates are and what they believe. Letting them hide behind slogans is a terrible strategy.

But most of all, people must vote. All that matters is turning out the vote. Period. Elections are won by those who cast ballots.

That’s the whole point of the GOP proposing — and in many states enacting — laws to suppress the votes of people not in line with either what’s left of traditional Republicanism and politically flaccid Trumpism.

America is home to far more good, decent and caring people than losers drawn to Trump.

Vote. Be an owner of our government, not a renter or, worst of all, a squatter.

The post Trumpism on the Run, California Recall Shows appeared first on DCReport.org.