Our Space Launch System rocket is on the move this summer — literally. With the help of big and small businesses in all 50 states, various pieces of hardware are making their way to Louisiana for manufacturing, to Alabama for testing, and to Florida for final assembly. All of that work brings us closer to the launch of Artemis 1, SLS and Orion’s first mission to the Moon.
The SLS rocket will feature the largest core stage we have ever built before. It’s so large, in fact, that we had to modify and refurbish our barge Pegasus to accommodate the massive load. Pegasus was originally designed to transport the giant external tanks of the space shuttles on the 900-mile journey from our rocket factory, Michoud Assembly Facility, in New Orleans to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now, our barge ferries test articles from Michoud along the river to Huntsville, Alabama, for testing at Marshall Space Flight Center. Just a week ago, the last of four structural test articles — the liquid oxygen tank — was loaded onto Pegasus to be delivered at Marshall for testing. Once testing is completed and the flight hardware is cleared for launch, Pegasus will again go to work — this time transporting the flight hardware along the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Cape Canaveral.
The massive, five-segment solid rocket boosters each weigh 1.6 million pounds. That’s the size of four blue whales! The only way to move the components for the powerful boosters on SLS from Promontory, Utah, to the Booster Fabrication Facility and Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy is by railway. That’s why you’ll find railway tracks leading from these assembly buildings and facilities to and from the launch pad, too. Altogether, we have about 38-mile industrial short track on Kennedy alone. Using a small fleet of specialized cars and hoppers and existing railways across the US, we can move the large, bulky equipment from the Southwest to Florida’s Space Coast. With all the motor segments complete in January, the last booster motor segment (pictured above) was moved to storage in Utah. Soon, trains will deliver all 10 segments to Kennedy to be stacked with the booster forward and aft skirts and prepared for flight.
A regular passenger airplane doesn’t have the capacity to carry the specialized hardware for SLS and our Orion spacecraft. Equipped with a unique hinged nose that can open more than 200 degrees, our Super Guppy airplane is specially designed to carry the hulking hardware, like the Orion stage adapter, to the Cape. That hinged nose means cargo is actually loaded from the front, not the back, of the airplane. The Orion stage adapter, delivered to Kennedy in 2018, joins to the rocket’s interim cryogenic propulsion stage, which will give our spacecraft the push it needs to go to the Moon on Artemis 1. It fit perfectly inside the Guppy’s cargo compartment, which is 25 feet tall and 25 feet wide and 111 feet long.
In the end, all roads lead to Kennedy, and the star of the transportation show is really the “crawler.” Rolling along at a delicate 1 MPH when it’s loaded with the mobile launcher, our two crawler-transporters are vital in bringing the fully assembled rocket to the launchpad for each Artemis mission. Each the size of a baseball field and powered by locomotive and large power generator engines, one crawler-transporter is able to carry 18 million pounds on the nine-mile journey to the launchpad. As of June 27, 2019, the mobile launcher atop crawler-transporter 2 made a successful final test roll to the launchpad, clearing the transporter and mobile launcher ready to carry SLS and Orion to the launchpad for Artemis 1.
It takes a lot of team work to launch Artemis 1. We are partnering with Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne to produce the complex structures of the rocket. Every one of our centers and more than 1,200 companies across the United States support the development of the rocket that will launch Artemis 1 to the Moon and, ultimately, to Mars. From supplying key tools to accelerate the development of the core stage to aiding the transportation of the rocket closer to the launchpad, companies like Futuramic in Michigan and Major Tool & Machine in Indiana, are playing a vital role in returning American astronauts to the Moon. This time, to stay. To stay up to date with the latest SLS progress, click here.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
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Version:1.0 StartHTML:000000254 EndHTML:000058875 StartFragment:000058746 EndFragment:000058813 StartSelection:000058746 EndSelection:000058813 SourceURL:https://www.dw.com/en/brazilian-president-jair-bolsonaro-decrees-easier-gun-laws/a-47097336 Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro decrees easier gun laws | News | DW | 16.01.2019 Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro decrees easier gun laws
A world leader in homicides, Brazil is to have more relaxed gun laws. President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree making it easier for people to own guns, and thus defend themselves.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed the decree making it easier for Brazilians to own firearms on Wednesday.
The former army captain and far-right leader said it would help people defend themselves; with less restrictive gun laws: "you can be sure that violence will fall," he claimed in a television interview last week.
In 2017, nearly 64,000 people were killed, the majority of them by firearms. Brazil's overall homicide rate is 30.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. This is three times higher than the level that the United Nations classifies as endemic violence.
"The people decided in favor of buying guns and ammunition and we can't deny what the people wanted at that moment," Bolsonaro said. He was referring to a referendum in 2005 when Brazilians voted against banning the manufacturing and selling of guns.
-o reason for a gun
New categories for gun ownership include citizens living in rural areas, in urban areas with high levels of homicide, business owners, gun collectors and hunters.
Buyers must be at least 25 years old, take a course at a gun club, undergo a psychological exam and not have a criminal record. Under the new decree, they no longer have to justify their interest in owning a gun.
"For a long time it was the state that decided who had the right or not to defend themselves, their family and their property. Today... we give Brazilian citizens the right to decide."
Four guns instead of two
People can own four guns, instead of the previous limit on two and do not have to renew the permit for 10 years.
Gun owners do have to have a safe with a key if there are children, adolescents or a person with a mental disability in the home.
They also can not yet carry the weapons in public, although Bolsonaro is planning to change that in a future law.
The law goes against an opinion poll by Datafolha last December which showed 61 percent of respondents believed firearms should be banned and posed a threat to others.
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro said on Thursday he would do all he could to "to re-establish order and democracy" in Venezuela, while his foreign minister met with Venezuelan opposition leaders.
The right-wing government of Bolsonaro on Saturday said it recognized Juan Guaido, a Venezuelan opposition leader who is head of the congress, as the rightful president of Venezuela - even though Guaido himself has not proclaimed himself president.
Socialist President Nicolas Maduro began a new term last week under a cloud of international criticism by governments around the world, who have described him as an illegitimate leader whose policies have plunged Venezuela into its worst ever economic crisis.
"We will continue doing everything possible to re-establish order, democracy and freedom there," Bolsonaro said in a video, in which he stood next to the head of the opposition-appointed Supreme Court in exile, Miguel Angel Martin.
"We asked the people of Venezuela to resist and have faith, because I believe a solution is coming soon," Bolsonaro said in the video issued by his office.
Guaido, a lawmaker from the hard-line Popular Will opposition party, said last week he was prepared to assume the presidency on an interim basis and call elections, but would only do so with support of the armed forces.
Since taking office Jan. 1, Bolsonaro has stepped up criticism of Maduro's government, the United States' biggest ideological foe in Latin America.
Also at the meeting was a representative for Luis Almagro, the secretary general of the Organization of American States who has said Venezuela should be suspended from the regional forum.
Bolsonaro's foreign minister Ernesto Araujo spent the morning huddled with a group of Venezuelan opposition leaders, led by the exiled former mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, to analyze the situation and Guaido's readiness to take over as acting president, a Brazilian foreign ministry statement said.
Venezuela's Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The meeting also discussed ideas for "concrete action" to re-establish
democracy in Venezuela, the statement said, without giving further details.
RIO DE JANEIRO—If you’re shocked by the transformations that Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new president, is planning for his country, you haven’t been paying attention.
Riding in on a wave of frustration with more than a decade of left-wing leadership, Bolsonaro has promised to bring dramatic change to Brazil, change intended to make leftists squirm. And if his first two weeks in office tell us anything, it’s that those who thought his brash talk—of ending policies creating protected land reserves for indigenous populations or of liberalizing Brazil’s gun laws to make it easier for Brazilians to own guns—was just campaign bluster might want to take a serious look at the president’s plans. He intends to follow through on his promises, even the most controversial ones.
What happens in Brazil has consequences not just for the country, but also for Latin America and the world. Brazil is the continent’s biggest economy and home to both the world’s largest rainforest and 211 million people. Globally, Bolsonaro’s critics fear that he could drive South America’s largest democracy toward fascism or even toward a return to military rule. An unapologetic firebrand, he has already signaled that he intends to lead Brazil into a new era. But what exactly will that mean for Brazil, and for everyone else?
Brazil’s Fiery Far-Right Presidential Favorite Channels Trump Chayenne Polimédio
The Brazilian Spring That Never Arrived Vincent Bevins
Four areas in particular lie at the nexus of Bolsonaro’s priorities and critics’ concerns: land rights, education, the economy, and public security. What changes does the new president promise on these fronts, and which of those can he actually follow through on? These are the topics to watch in the coming months.
Land Rights
One of Bolsonaro’s first acts as president—which he boasted of on Twitter, à la Donald Trump—was to halt all new demarcations of indigenous lands. In effect, that means the decades-long effort by Brazil’s indigenous populations to seek recognition and legal title to land has been foiled.
Bolsonaro has argued that demarcated land for indigenous peoples is akin to keeping them “secluded in reserves like zoo animals” when “an Indian is a human being just like us.” His critics, though, see an ulterior motive: Stopping the demarcation process opens up land—especially in remote parts of the Amazon—to powerful players such as the mining, farming, and logging industries. Functionally, indigenous reserves have been used as a proxy for environmental protections.
And indigenous peoples are not a strong enough lobbying group to fight back. Maurício Santoro, an expert on Brazilian politics at Rio de Janeiro State University, told me that along with the LGBTQ community, indigenous peoples are the most threatened social group under Bolsonaro’s administration.
There are structural limits holding Bolsonaro back, though: His ability to strip all of indigenous peoples’ land-demarcation rights is hamstrung by strong protections for those communities under the Brazilian constitution, ones Santoro is confident the Brazilian supreme court will uphold. Toss in a heavy dose of international pressure to protect indigenous peoples, and Bolsonaro might see his land-rights plans backfire.
Education
Brazil’s education system is worse than you might imagine. In the hot north of the country, some students attend schools made of sticks and mud. In Rio’s hillside slums, or favelas, schools are out of session for weeks or months at a time, thanks to regular gunfire in the area. Even in the better-educated south of the country, teachers have been protesting in the streets for better pay for years. And countrywide, illiteracy is on the rise.
/These are not, however, the education issues Bolsonaro has promised to focus on. Instead, his primary, and most controversial, proposal is for the removal of what he calls “Marxist garbage”—code for any teaching that deals with sexuality or gender issues, or even evolution—from the classroom. He has also proposed mandatory classroom lessons on “moral and civic education,” a kind of Patriotism 101.
His new minister of education is a Colombian professor emeritus at Brazil’s military schools who has blogged about keeping “traditional values” in the classroom and who has thus far positioned himself as Bolsonaro’s yes-man. Look for Brazil’s president to press him to make smaller changes, possibly including stripping out essay questions about issues such as gender violence from the national college-entrance exam.
Economy
Part of the reason many Brazilians elected Bolsonaro was because he promised to make Brazil more capitalist. His voters point to Venezuela and its crumbling socialist state as an example of the dangerous path Brazil was on under (now-jailed) former President Luiz Inácio da Silva. (Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, for his part, called Bolsonaro a “fascist” during his inauguration speech.)
How does Bolsonaro want to do this? Privatization. The idea tantalizes Brazil’s most powerful would-be investors, but not so much everyday Brazilians: Polls show that most people here are against full-throttle privatization, and instead enjoy their welfare state and the nationalized health, education, and unemployment systems. Plus, Bolsonaro’s party has only about a tenth of the seats in Brazil’s congress, and the president has yet to cement any political alliances that will help him pass big, expensive legislation.
An easier path than wholesale privatization may be for Bolsonaro to change the pension system, particularly by raising the retirement age. Today military leaders can retire young with their full salary, plus benefits, for life—2017 numbers show that 55 percent of people who served in the military retired before the age of 50, and the minimum age of retirement can be as low as 55 for civilian women. By raising the retirement age and reducing pension benefits, Bolsonaro would be cutting the overall costs of doing business in Brazil, helping win over business leaders and international investors alike. Bolsonaro himself has expressed anxiety over making this change, but Carlos Kawall, the chief economist for the Brazilian lender Banco Safra, notes that the pension-reform battle will be a major indicator of the future success of the country’s economy.
The thing is, one of Bolsonaro’s biggest bases of support is the military; the former army captain will find that stripping the benefits of his former colleagues is unlikely to play well. Instead, Santoro predicts that Bolsonaro will look to pass a watered down, minimalist reform, which may include setting the minimum age for retirement at 65, or even 62, for everyone.
Public Security
Brazil is the world’s leader in homicides: In 2017, 63,880 people were murdered here, and despite federal intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro and along the Brazilian border with Venezuela, a comprehensive solution still eludes the government.
Bolsonaro has marketed himself as a locked-and-loaded tough guy (his trademark gesture is two fingers pointing two imaginary guns), and that image has resonated strongly with his supporters, who are both fed up with the violence and also intrigued by the idea of American-style gun ownership. Forty-one percent of Brazilians think gun possession should be allowed for a citizen to defend himself. Currently, just to keep a gun at home, most Brazilians have to jump through significant hoops, including regular psychological and physical tests. They even have to justify needing one at all, for example, with a police record showing they have been targeted by personal threats.
In one of his first tweets as president, Bolsonaro promised to liberalize gun control in Brazil. For now, the only people who walk around with guns in Brazil are either cops or robbers. Bolsonaro wants to change that, not only making it easier for Brazilians to buy guns, but allowing them to carry guns as well.
Loosening gun-ownership restrictions would be one of Bolsonaro’s easiest successes, Santoro said, because such reforms would not require asking congress for much money, and would win him plaudits from his supporters. The results, however, could be brutal.
The São Paulo nonprofit Instituto Sou da Paz collects data on gun ownership and gun use in Brazil, and its executive director, Ivan Marques, says the figures show that “getting more guns into circulation will mean negative consequences for public security in Brazil.” He points to a study published by the Brazilian government itself in 2013 that shows that a 1 percent increase in guns in an area corresponds with a 1 to 2 percent increase in the homicide rate of that area. “Any weakening of gun laws,” Marques says, “will leave us fated to an increase in the levels of violence.”
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