domingo, 31 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: SpaceX’s Dragon, Carrying 2 Astronauts, Docks at International Space Station SpaceX’s Dragon, Carrying 2 Astronauts, Docks at International Space Station



(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — SpaceX delivered two astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA on Sunday, following up a historic liftoff with an equally smooth docking in yet another first for Elon Musk’s company.

With test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken poised to take over manual control if necessary, the SpaceX Dragon capsule pulled up to the station and docked automatically, no assistance needed.

It was the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft carried astronauts to the orbiting lab in its nearly 20 years. NASA considers this the opening volley in a business revolution encircling Earth and eventually stretching to the moon and Mars.

The docking occurred just 19 hours after a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Saturday afternoon from Kennedy Space Center, the nation’s first astronaut launch to orbit from home soil in nearly a decade.

Thousands jammed surrounding beaches, bridges and towns to watch as SpaceX became the world’s first private company to send astronauts into orbit, and ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA.

A few hours before docking, the Dragon riders reported that the capsule was performing beautifully. Just in case, they slipped back into their pressurized launch suits and helmets for the rendezvous.

The three space station residents kept cameras trained on the incoming capsule for the benefit of flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Gleaming white in the sunlight, the Dragon was easily visible from a few miles out, its nose cone open and exposing its docking hook as well as a blinking light. The capsule loomed ever larger on live NASA TV as it closed the gap.

Hurley and Behnken took over the controls and did a little piloting less than a couple hundred yards (meters) out as part of the test flight, before putting it back into automatic for the final approach. Hurley said the capsule handled “really well, very crisp.”

SpaceX and NASA officials had held off on any celebrations until after Sunday morning’s docking — and possibly not until the two astronauts are back on Earth sometime this summer.

NASA has yet to decide how long Hurley and Behnken will spend at the space station, somewhere between one and four months. While they’re there, the Dragon test pilots will join the one U.S. and two Russian station residents in performing experiments and possibly spacewalks to install fresh station batteries.

In a show-and-tell earlier Sunday, the astronauts gave a quick tour of the Dragon’s sparkling clean insides, quite spacious for a capsule. They said the liftoff was pretty bumpy and dynamic, nothing the simulators could have mimicked.

The blue sequined dinosaur accompanying them — their young sons’ toy, named Tremor — was also in good shape, Behnken assured viewers. Tremor was going to join Earthy, a plush globe delivered to the space station on last year’s test flight of a crew-less crew Dragon. Behnken said both toys would return to Earth with them at mission’s end.

An old-style capsule splashdown is planned.

After liftoff, Musk told reporters that the capsule’s return will be more dangerous in some ways than its launch. Even so, getting the two astronauts safely to orbit and then the space station had everyone breathing huge sighs of relief.

As always, Musk was looking ahead.

“This is hopefully the first step on a journey toward a civilization on Mars,” he said Saturday evening.

sábado, 30 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: SpaceX’s Crewed Launch Puts America Back in an Elite Group of Spacefaring Nations SpaceX’s Crewed Launch Puts America Back in an Elite Group of Spacefaring Nations



You never know what you’ve got til it’s gone. And if you don’t believe that, consider the national jubilation at 3:22 PM EDT Saturday afternoon, when an American rocket carrying an American crew lifted off from American soil for the first time since 2011, carrying astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station (ISS). The successful launch comes just a few days after Wednesday’s initial attempt was scrubbed due to weather.

The last time there was this kind of U.S. hoopla for a mere flight to low-Earth orbit might have been the first time, on February 20, 1962, when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the planet. Orbital flight has since become routine, with 135 missions flown by the space shuttle fleet alone. But when the last shuttle was retired in 2011, America became a grounded nation—even a humbled nation—reduced to hitching rides aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft at a cool $80 million a seat. So Saturday’s launch, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft, sends one signal more powerfully than any other: when it comes to space, America is back.

“This is a big moment in time,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in a press conference earlier this week. “It’s been nine years since we’ve had this opportunity.”

It’s not just the fact that America is flying again, it’s the way that it’s flying. Saturday’s launch was the result of 10 years of work under NASA’s commercial crew program, an initiative begun in 2010 to get the space agency out of the business of flying astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit and turn the job over to private companies. NASA would then buy the services of the commercial providers like any other customer, freeing up the space agency to concentrate its human-exploration efforts on crewed missions to the moon and Mars. The space agency concedes that for today’s flight it is in many ways the junior partner.

“SpaceX is controlling the vehicle, there’s no fluff about that,” said Norm Knight, a NASA flight operations manager, in a conversation with the Associated Press.

But in truth, the program was never truly as private-sector as it seemed. After NASA selected both SpaceX and Boeing to develop and build the new crew vehicles, it paid the companies $6.8 billion—$2.6 billion to SpaceX and $4.2 billion to Boeing—in research and development funding, and contracted with them to ferry cargo and crew to the space station once they had built working ships.

Both companies were supposed to begin flying crews as early as 2016, and both are clearly well behind schedule. Boeing looked like it might be the first out of the gate after the uncrewed test launch of its CST-100 Starliner in December 2019. But while the spacecraft made it safely both to orbit and back home, a software failure caused it to use too much maneuvering fuel, preventing it from achieving its principal objective of docking with the ISS. Boeing now needs to repeat the uncrewed flight—and get it right this time—before it will be permitted to carry astronauts. That left the field clear for SpaceX to be first—an opening it took advantage of with Saturday’s launch.

Credit for SpaceX’s big win goes in large measure to the company’s proven line of hardware, including its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. Counting its maiden flight in June 2010, it had 83 launches before today’s, in some cases ferrying satellites to orbit for paying customers, in other cases making cargo runs to the ISS. Part of the secret of the Falcon 9’s reliability is its simplicity. Rather than design entirely different rockets for different payload sizes, SpaceX goes by a simple more-is-better rule. Its first rocket, the Falcon, used a single engine, powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen. The Falcon 9, true to its name, uses a cluster of 9 of the same engines; and the Falcon Heavy, the bruiser of the SpaceX fleet, lifts off under the power of a whopping 27 engines, arranged in three clusters of nine.

What further sets the Falcon 9 apart from its competitors—such as United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V or Europe’s Ariane 5—is its reusable first stage. Instead of just dumping the spent stage in the ocean when the rocket is partway to space, SpaceX designs its first stages to fly back to a landing platform and touch down on extendable legs, allowing them to be refurbished and re-used. So far, there have been 41 such successful landings, and 31 first stages have flown more than once. The result: cost savings. SpaceX advertises its services at $62 million per launch, compared to $165 million for Atlas or Ariane.

The Dragon spacecraft is similarly reusable. The Cargo version of the spacecraft has been flown 22 times—21 of which involved resupply missions to the space station. Nine of the launches have involved vehicles that already had undergone at least one previous flight. The interior space of the Crew Dragon is configurable to hold from two to seven astronauts. It stands 8.1 m (26.7 ft) tall and is 4 m (13 ft) wide. That’s a big jump over the old Apollo spacecraft at 3.2 m (10.5 ft) tall and and 4 m (13 ft) across. And again, while the very purpose of the commercial crew program was get the government out of the business of designing spacecraft for low-Earth orbit, no one pretends that with NASA’s own astronauts in the seats, the space agency itself would not be at least a collaborator in the design process.

“[SpaceX] had this vision of how the Crew Dragon should look, feel and operate,” says John Posey, lead engineer for NASA’s Crew Dragon team. “But we had two-way communication as we started building components, testing components, test flying components, just making sure that we were always working together and coming in towards the best, optimized solution.”

Behnken and Hurley were good choices for the maiden Dragon mission. Both are veterans of two space shuttle missions, and Hurley, fittingly, was one of the crew members aboard the final space shuttle mission in 2011. Despite all that, once they reach the ISS, they will be just two more crew members, the 64th such crew to launch to the station in the 20 years it has been continuously occupied. They will join NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, getting the station’s crew complement closer to its customary six.

Behnken’s and Hurley’s stay will be relatively short, as space station visits go. They will remain aboard for at least a month, though in no case will they remain for longer than 110 days, since the current Crew Dragon is not rated for a longer stay in the punishing environment of space. (Ultimately, the Dragon will be required to be certified for a 210-day stay.) Part of what will determine when the two new arrivals will come home will be the progress Boeing makes in developing its Starliner. There are only two docking ports aboard the station; one is now occupied by the Russians’ Soyuz rocket and the other will accommodate the Dragon. If Starliner is ready for its scheduled uncrewed test flight before the Dragon’s 110 days are up, Behnken and Hurley will have to climb aboard and clear out to make room.

But all of that is for later. Today is for savoring the simple fact that the U.S. has once again rejoined the family of space-faring, astronaut-launching, future-gazing nations. The nation that for generations led the world in the exploration of space is now poised to reclaim that mantle.

jueves, 28 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: Why SpaceX’s Historic Mission Needs to Wait Until Saturday for a Second Attempt Why SpaceX’s Historic Mission Needs to Wait Until Saturday for a Second Attempt



When you’ve got a 230-ft. tall rocket filled with 76,000 gallons of explosive fuel sitting on the launch pad, the President in the viewing stands and millions worldwide waiting to watch the great machine fly, you’d figure you wouldn’t schedule the event for a spring afternoon in Florida, when bad weather stands to wreck the whole party. Those are exactly the conditions in which the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley tried—and failed—to get off the launch pad on May 27, for the historic first crewed launch from American soil since 2011.

The scrubbed flight left a lot of people asking, Why don’t NASA and SpaceX just pick a day and time to launch when the forecast is clear? The answer: It’s not up to them. It’s up to physics.

If you were trying to launch any old spacecraft into any old orbit you could, indeed, pick pretty much any old time to fly. But things are almost never as simple as that, especially when you’re trying to rendezvous with another object already in Earth orbit — in this case, the International Space Station (ISS). Pulling off so delicate a pas de deux typically requires precise timing, which means launching in a fixed time frame on a fixed day within what’s known as a “launch window.”

The most conspicuous orbiting object with which astronauts have attempted to rendezvous is the moon. Back in the days of the Apollo program, the trick was not to aim for where the moon was in the sky at the moment of launch, but for where it would be three days later, when the spacecraft had covered the Earth-to-moon distance. With the moon orbiting the Earth at 3,683 km per hour (2,288 mph), that took some careful planning. Things were made even tougher by the fact that just reaching the vicinity of the moon wasn’t sufficient; after traveling 386,000 km (240,000 mi.), the crews were aiming to enter a lunar orbit just 97 km (60 mi) above the surface of the moon. That’s not just like standing in one end zone of a football field and taking aim at an apple in the other end zone—it’s like trying to skin the apple with your bullet.

The Apollo crews were also trying to arrive at the moon during optimal lighting conditions for landing, when the sun was at the correct angle in the lunar sky to cast shadows that would highlight but not exaggerate the terrain. That narrowed the launch window even further. If all of those constraints meant trying to launch in the rain and hoping for a break in the clouds, that’s what you’d have to do.

Merely getting into Earth orbit is simpler, but presents launch window headaches of its own. Spacecraft typically do not circle the planet in perfectly tidy trajectories that take them around and around the equator. Rather, they are launched into orbits that are tilted at inclinations relative to the equator. Cape Canaveral’s latitude is approximately 28º, so an orbiting spacecraft launched from the Kennedy Space Center flies similarly inclined, like a crooked hula hoop, moving 28º above and below the equator as it travels around the world.

Things get more complicated still. Earth itself is tilted 23º, and while the planet takes 24 hours to make a single rotation, a spacecraft needs only 90 minutes to complete an orbit. The result: on a flat map, the spacecraft would appear to be inscribing a sort of sine wave pattern, moving above and below the equator, never passing over precisely the same point on the ground on two consecutive orbits. The ISS orbits at a higher inclination of 51.6º—a concession the U.S. made to Russia, which launches its spacecraft further north, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Flight planners sending astronauts to the ISS, where Behnken and Hurley were headed, must time their launches for exactly when the station is in an optimal position to make the rendezvous happen at all and, if possible, to make the pursuit time as short as possible. Uncrewed cargo missions sent from Baikonur to the space station may have comparatively wide launch windows requiring as much as a two-day flight to the station. But cargo doesn’t kvetch about discomfort. Crewed missions often have narrower windows that allow astronauts and cosmonauts to catch up with the ISS in as little as four orbits—or six hours—freeing them from the confinement of their spacecraft as quickly as possible. For Behnken and Hurley, launching from Cape Canaveral, at its 28º latitude, into the ISS’s 51.6º inclination means a relatively long 19-hour chase. But it would be much longer still if they picked the wrong launch window.

With the weather having slammed that window closed on May 27, SpaceX’s historic mission is looking at a new one that would permit liftoff at 3:22 PM EDT on Saturday, May 30. If that window is closed shut, too, the next one opens the following day at 3:00 PM EDT. You can watch the next attempts right here.

Space—as people have said and said and said again—is hard. Sometimes, the hardest part of all is just getting off the ground.

miércoles, 27 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: SpaceX’s First Crewed Launch Was Scrubbed. Here’s the Next Possible Launch Window SpaceX’s First Crewed Launch Was Scrubbed. Here’s the Next Possible Launch Window



(Cape Canaveral, Fla.) — The launch of a SpaceX rocket ship with two NASA astronauts on a history-making flight into orbit has been called off with 16 minutes to go in the countdown because of the danger of lightning.

Liftoff is rescheduled for Saturday.

The spacecraft was set to blast off Wednesday afternoon for the International Space Station, ushering in a new era in commercial spaceflight and putting NASA back in the business of launching astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

Ever since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian rockets to carry astronauts to and from the space station.

With thunderstorms threatening a delay, two NASA astronauts climbed aboard a SpaceX rocket ship Wednesday for liftoff on a history-making flight that was seen as a giant leap forward for the booming business of commercial space travel.

Space veterans Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken were scheduled to ride into orbit aboard the brand-new Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, taking off for the International Space Station at 4:33 p.m. EDT from the same launch pad used during the Apollo moon missions a half-century ago.

Smiling, waving and giving the traditional thumbs-up, the two men said farewell to their families — exchanging blown kisses and pantomiming hugs for their young sons from a coronavirus-safe distance — before setting out for the pad in a gull-wing Tesla SUV, another product from SpaceX’s visionary founder, Elon Musk.

Both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence arrived to watch the liftoff.

The flight would mark the first time a private company sent humans into orbit.

It would also be the first time in nearly a decade that the United States launched astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil. Ever since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space station.

With 2 1/2 hours to go before liftoff, controllers put the chances of launch at just 40 percent because of thunderstorms at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Thunder could be heard as the astronauts made their way to the pad, and a tornado warning was issued moments after they climbed into their capsule.

In the event of a postponement, the next launch opportunity would be Saturday.

The preparations took place in the shadow of the coronavirus outbreak that has killed an estimated 100,000 Americans.

“We’re launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil. We haven’t done this really since 2011, so this is a unique moment in time,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said.

With this launch, he said, “everybody can look up and say, ’Look, the future is so much brighter than the present.′ And I really hope that this is an inspiration to the world.”

Musk, wearing a mask and keeping his distance, chatted with the two NASA astronauts just before they left for the launch pad. The mission would put Musk and SpaceX in the same league as only three countries — Russia, the U.S. and China, which sent astronauts into orbit in that order.

“What today is about is reigniting the dream of space and getting people fired up about the future,” he said in a NASA interview.

A solemn-sounding Musk said he felt his responsibilities most strongly when he saw the astronauts’ wives and sons just before launch. He said he told them: “We’ve done everything we can to make sure your dads come back OK.”

NASA pushed ahead with the launch despite the viral outbreak but kept the guest list at Kennedy extremely limited and asked spectators to stay at home. Still, beaches and parks along Florida’s Space Coast are open again, and hours before the launch, cars and RVs already were lining the causeway in Cape Canaveral.

The space agency also estimated 1.7 million people were watching the launch preparations online during the afternoon.

Among the sightseers was Erin Gatz, who came prepared for both rain and pandemic. Accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son, she brought face masks and a small tent to protect against the elements.

She said the children had faint memories of watching in person one of the last shuttle launches almost a decade ago when they were preschoolers.

“I wanted them to see the flip side and get to see the next era of space travel,” said Gatz, who lives in Deltona, Florida. “It’s exciting and hopeful.”

Hurley, 53, and Behnken, 49, are both two-time shuttle fliers.

NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to transport astronauts to the space station in a new kind of public-private partnership. Development of SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner capsules took longer than expected, however. Boeing’s ship is not expected to fly astronauts into space until early 2021.

“We’re doing it differently than we’ve ever done it before,” Bridenstine said. “We’re transforming how we do spaceflight in the future.”

lunes, 25 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: Stormy Weather Threatens to Delay First SpaceX Astronaut Launch Stormy Weather Threatens to Delay First SpaceX Astronaut Launch



(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Stormy weather is threatening to delay SpaceX’s first astronaut launch.

A SpaceX rocket is scheduled to blast off Wednesday afternoon from Kennedy Space Center, carrying a Dragon capsule with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station. It will be the first time astronauts launch from Florida in nine years and a first for a private company.

The manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, Kathy Lueders, said everything was progressing well — at least on the ground.

“Now the only thing we need to do is figure out how to control the weather,” she said Monday evening as rain continued to drench the area. “We’re continuing to be vigilant and careful and make sure we do this right.”

Forecasters put the odds of acceptable launch weather at 40%. But that doesn’t include the conditions all the way up the U.S. and Canadian coasts and across the sea to Ireland — a complicated mix of measurements unique to the Dragon crew capsule.

The Dragon’s emergency escape system can kick in, if necessary, all the way to orbit. If that happens, the capsule will need relatively calm wind and seas in which to splash down.

SpaceX will have at least two recovery ships deployed off Florida, and NASA will have two military cargo planes ready to take off. Additional planes will be stationed in New York and England to assist with a potential water rescue, according to Lueders.

Hans Koenigsmann, a vice president for SpaceX, said the launch control team will incorporate global weather patterns and models to determine whether it’s safe to launch.

“If the weather gods are working with us,” he said, liftoff will occur at 4:33 p.m. SpaceX has a split-second launch window.

The good news is that the tropical weather headed toward Cape Canaveral should be gone in a couple days, with conditions also improving up the Eastern Seaboard later in the week.

If SpaceX doesn’t launch Wednesday, its next attempt would be Saturday.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit Fails on First Rocket Launch Attempt Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit Fails on First Rocket Launch Attempt



(LOS ANGELES) — Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit failed Monday on its first attempt to launch a test satellite into space aboard a rocket carried aloft by a Boeing 747 and released over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California.

The inaugural launch had appeared to be going well until moments after the rocket was dropped from beneath the left wing of the jumbo jet dubbed Cosmic Girl.

“We’ve confirmed a clean release from the aircraft. However, the mission terminated shortly into the flight. Cosmic Girl and our flight crew are safe and returning to base,” Virgin Orbit said in its official Twitter commentary on the launch.

There was no immediate word on what went wrong.

The highly modified jumbo jet took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in the desert north of Los Angeles and flew out just beyond the Channel Islands, where the drop occurred.

The rocket was supposed to fall for a few seconds before the first of its two stages ignited and hurtled it down the coast toward the South Pole for insertion of its demonstration payload into a low Earth orbit.

The purpose of the flight was to gather data on every step of the launch process rather than to have a useful satellite in orbit; the demonstration payload was described as an inert mass and the intended orbit was very low to avoid contributing to the problem of space junk.

The launch attempt followed five years of development of the 70-foot-long (21.3 meter) LauncherOne rocket.

Virgin Orbit, headquartered in Long Beach, California, is a sister company of Virgin Galactic, the company Branson founded to carry passengers on suborbital flights into the lower reaches of space. Virgin Galactic is preparing to begin operations in southern New Mexico.

New story in Science and Health from Time: SpaceX and NASA Are Set for a Historic Crewed Launch This Week. Here’s How to Watch SpaceX and NASA Are Set for a Historic Crewed Launch This Week. Here’s How to Watch



It’s been a long time since the country that once flew nine crewed missions to the moon has been able to launch even a single human being to space aboard its own rockets from its own soil. Ever since the final flight of the space shuttle in July 2011, the U.S. has been dependent on buying rides aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft—at a current $80 million a seat—if it wants to get as far as low-Earth orbit.

All of that is set to change at 4:33 PM EDT on Wednesday May 27, when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are scheduled to take off aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket, bound for the International Space Station (ISS). Both astronauts are veterans of two previous shuttle flights, and Hurley, fittingly, was one of the crew members aboard the final shuttle mission. If all goes to plan, the crew will reach orbit just 12 minutes after launch, and will dock with the station before noon the following morning. TIME has a team on the ground reporting from Cape Canaveral; you can watch the launch above.

Wednesday’s flight has been a long time in coming. It was in 2010 that NASA began its commercial crew program and in 2016 that it awarded contracts worth $2.6 billion to SpaceX and $4.2 billion to Boeing, charging both companies with the task of developing crew vehicles capable of shuttling astronauts to and from the ISS, freeing NASA up to focus on crewed missions to the moon and Mars.

Early estimates called for flights to begin as early as 2016, but the schedules slipped and slipped and slipped again, with NASA increasingly chafing at the delays. Boeing’s spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, is not expected to have its first crewed flight until sometime in early 2021, but a SpaceX success this week will lift both companies, proving the commercial crew model was a sound idea in the first place.

Behnken and Hurley will join a crew of one astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts already aboard the station. How long the new arrivals will stay is unclear. At a minimum they are expected to be aloft for at least a month; at the most, they’ll stay just shy of four months. Boeing will in part determine how long they stay. When the company is ready to fly its next uncrewed test of the Starliner, the Crew Dragon will have to leave to free up the necessary docking port. In no event is this version of the Crew Dragon certified to spend more than 110 days in space, though in the future the ship will have to be fit for 210.

Bad weather could always scrub the launch. So could any number of last minute technical glitches. But with the rocket poised on the pad, the country itself is poised for a new chapter in its long story of space exploration.

sábado, 23 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: President Trump Will Attend First NASA Astronaut Launch in More Than a Decade President Trump Will Attend First NASA Astronaut Launch in More Than a Decade



(Sterling, Va.) — President Donald Trump plans to be on the Florida coast Wednesday to watch American astronauts blast into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center for the first time in more than a decade.

It will be the first time since the space shuttle program ended in 2011 that U.S. astronauts will launch into space aboard an American rocket from American soil.

Also new Wednesday: a private company — not NASA — is running the show.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the conductor and NASA the customer as businesses begin chauffeuring astronauts to the International Space Station.

The NASA/SpaceX Commercial Crew flight test launch will carry NASA’s newest test pilots, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

They’re scheduled to blast off from launch pad 39A, the same one the Apollo astronauts used to get to the moon.

The shift to private companies allows NASA to zero in on deep space travel. The space agency is working to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 under orders from the White House, but that deadline appears increasingly unlikely even as three newly chosen commercial teams rush to develop lunar landers. Mars also beckons.

The White House portrayed the launch as an extension of Trump’s promise to reassert American dominance in space. He recently oversaw creation of the Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.

“Our destiny, beyond the Earth, is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security,” Trump said in a statement.

Vice President Mike Pence, who is chairman of the National Space Council, also plans to attend Wednesday’s launch.

viernes, 22 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: Large Study Finds No Benefit — and Potential Harm — in Using Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 Large Study Finds No Benefit — and Potential Harm — in Using Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19



In the largest observational study thus far investigating the drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, researchers found little evidence that it helps, and worrying evidence that the medication may cause harm.

In a study published May 22 in the journal Lancet, scientists in the U.S. and Switzerland report on an analysis of more than 96,000 people hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 in 671 hospitals on six continents. Nearly 15,000 patients were treated with one of the following: chloroquine (which is an older version of hydroxychloroquine), hydroxychloroquine, or either of those drugs in combination with an antibiotic. The remainder did not receive any of these medications and served as the control.

People in any of the four treatment groups were more likely to die during their hospitalization than those not treated. People receiving either chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine alone were 16% to 18% more likely to die in the hospital compared to those not receiving the medications, and those treated with these medications in combination with an antibiotic were 22% to 24% more likely to die in the hospital. These risks remained significant even after the researchers controlled for factors such as smoking, underlying heart disease, diabetes, lung disease, or immune conditions.

In addition, those receiving the medications had higher risk of developing abnormal heart rhythms — a known risk factor of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — compared to people who were not treated with the medications.

“However we sliced and diced the data, the results were identical,” says Dr. Mandeep Mehra, chair of cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who led the study. “There was no evidence of benefit, and a consistent signal of harm — and in particular, harm linked to heart rhythm disturbances.”

The findings come as U.S. President Donald Trump claimed to be taking hydroxychloroquine, which he requested from the White House physician, because he “heard a lot of good stories.” Mehra notes that the study included only people diagnosed with COVID-19, while the President has not been reported to be infected.

Hydroxychloroquine is approved to treat malaria — replacing chloroquine in many parts of the world after the malaria parasite became resistant to chloroquine — as well as some autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, because of its ability to tamp down inflammation. Doctors started to turn to the drug to treat COVID-19 after a small study in France suggested it might help alleviate some of the disease’s inflammatory symptoms, which can compromise breathing and cause respiratory failure. The evidence for the drug’s effectiveness, however, hasn’t been established, although ongoing rigorous trials randomly assigning patients to receive hydroxychloroquine or placebo are still ongoing (including one headed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health).

But there is growing evidence that the medication may not be as helpful as doctors had hoped. In a study of more than 1,300 people admitted to New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Irving Medical Center, for example, people receiving hydroxychloroquine did not show any lower rate of needing ventilators, or a lower risk of dying during the study period than those not getting the drug. Studies from Europe and China similarly failed to find that the drug showed any benefit for patients.

Those studies have led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to warn health providers that they should not prescribe hydroxychloroquine off-label for COVID-19 patients unless they are part of a research study or carefully monitored in a hospital setting.

In fact, as the evidence continues to suggest that hydroxychloroquine may not provide much benefit, and instead might increase the risk of harm to the heart, Mehra says doctors may shift from considering hydroxychloroquine to other drugs being studied as COVID-19 treatments, like remdesivir. Studies indicate that remdesivir, an antiviral that has not yet been approved to treat any disease, may help people with COVID-19 to recover faster, and the drug received FDA emergency use authorization to treat hospitalized patients. Unlike hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir has not been linked to serious side effects so far, and therefore may be a more attractive option for doctors treating COVID-19 patients.

“They may be more likely to try something where there is a better chance of showing a net positive outcome,” says Mehra. “Why would you risk harm when there is so much consistent data showing lack of benefit [with hydroxychloroquine]?”

jueves, 21 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: How Remdesivir Works to Fight COVID-19 Inside the Body How Remdesivir Works to Fight COVID-19 Inside the Body



On May 1, the U.S Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization of remdesivir, an experimental anti-viral drug. With this clearance, doctors in the U.S. are now allowed to use the drug to treat patients with severe cases of COVID-19.

Remdesivir isn’t new. It was initially developed to treat Ebola and was also tested in the lab against SARS and MERS—two other coronaviruses that infect humans much like the virus that causes COVID-19. It never made it to the approval stage for those uses, but over the last four months, scientists desperate for options to help mitigate the coronavirus pandemic have been looking towards old drugs that could be repurposed. Remdesivir has in that time traveled an unprecedented path to regulatory approval, becoming one of the most promising therapies against COVID-19 to date.

Remdesivir isn’t a vaccine, and so it can’t prevent infection; instead, it works by attacking the virus once it is already spreading inside the body. Here is a look at how the COVID-19 virus propagates in the human body, and how the drug puts the brakes on that process.

STEP 1: Virus enters a cell

Viruses can’t multiply without using a cell’s protein-making machinery. So they first need to gain entry into a healthy cell. Coronaviruses, like the one that causes COVID-19, have a shell of spiky proteins that allow them to bind to cells.

STEP 2: Virus releases genetic code

The virus fuses with the cell and, once inside, releases a strand of RNA. Like a blueprint, RNA is a string of genetic code that has instructions to make exact copies of the virus.

STEP 3: Genetic code converts to proteins

Tiny particles in the host cell, called ribosomes, are equipped to read genetic material. When the virus’s RNA passes through the ribosome, the ribosome produces viral proteins.

STEP 4: Proteins make copies

Viral proteins are needed to make copies of the viral RNA, as well as other parts of the virus like the outer spikes and membrane. As more proteins and RNA strands are made, they proliferate, making exponentially more copies that fill up the cell.

STEP 5: Viral parts get assembled

The viral parts use mechanisms in the host cell to come together, forming a complete virus. When fully assembled, the virus can exit the cell to seek other healthy cells and start the process again.

STEP 6: Remdesivir blocks replication

Remdesivir mimics a part of the viral RNA. During the copying process, it inserts itself into the RNA strand. When attached, the drug prevents any further copying, leaving the RNA strand incomplete and unable to produce critical viral parts.

STEP 7: Virus slows down

Hampered by the drug, the entire replication process slows down. This means fewer viruses are assembled. Defective viruses with partial RNA can’t replicate in other cells.

miércoles, 20 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Scientist Behind Some of the World’s Best Coronavirus Images The Scientist Behind Some of the World’s Best Coronavirus Images



From her laboratory in the far western reaches of Montana, Elizabeth Fischer is trying to help people see what they’re up against in COVID-19.

Over the past three decades, Fischer, 58, and her team at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, part of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have captured and created some of the more dramatic images of the world’s most dangerous pathogens.

“I like to get images out there to try to convey that this is an entity, to try to demystify it, so this is something more tangible for people,” says Fischer, one of the country’s leading electron microscopists.

Now, as her renderings of the coronavirus flash across screens worldwide, she says: “You often hear people call it the invisible enemy. It’s trying to put that face out there.” Working in one of the nation’s 13 “Biosafety Level 4” labs—those equipped to safely handle the most dangerous pathogens—Fischer and her team visualize the world’s deadliest plagues from Ebola to HIV, salmonella to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Elizabeth Fischer uses an electron microscope to capture images of the coronavirus, which is about 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. “I like to get images out there to try to convey that this is an entity, to try to demystify it, so this is something more tangible for people,†Fischer says. (Courtesy of Elizabeth Fischer)
Courtesy of Elizabeth Fischer

The breathtaking images allow people to see a virus as elaborate biological structures with weaknesses that can be exploited, yielding clues for researchers about how to develop treatments and vaccines.

Originally from Evergreen, Col., Fischer completed a degree in biology at the University of Colorado-Boulder and contemplated going to medical school, before deciding instead to join the Peace Corps. She taught math and science for two years in Liberia, and then took time to travel through East Africa and Asia, including a trek into the Himalayas. Returning to Colorado, she immersed herself in the outdoor world she loved. She worked as a rafting guide on the Arkansas River for several summers, and as a children’s ski instructor at the Monarch Mountain ski resort during the winters.

She later enrolled in graduate school to study education, thinking she might teach biology. But when she took courses in electron microscopy, she was hooked.

It appealed to her sense of exotic adventure. “You’re looking at a world that most people don’t get to see,” she says. She switched gears and completed a master’s degree in biology.

Upon graduation, she sent her resume to a national microscopy job placement office and soon received a call from Rocky Mountain Laboratories. In 1994, she moved with her family to Hamilton, a city of fewer than 5,000 people about 50 miles south of Missoula, then worked her way up to become chief of the lab’s microscopy unit.

Some of the more stunning images of the coronavirus—about 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair—have come from Fischer’s microscope. One is Fischer’s photograph of viral particles being released from a dying cell infected with the virus.

An electron microscope photograph from Elizabeth Fischer shows viral particles being released from a dying cell infected with the coronavirus. The dozens of small, blue spheres emerging from the surface of a kidney cell are the virus particles themselves. The images produced by the electron microscopes are black-and-white; a visual artist colorizes them. (Courtesy of Elizabeth Fischer)
Courtesy of Elizabeth FischerAn electron microscope photograph showing viral particles (the small, blue spheres) being released from the surface of a dying kidney cell infected with the coronavirus.

As NIH director Dr. Francis Collins recently highlighted in his blog, the photo shows the orange-brown folds and protrusion on the surface of a primate’s kidney cell infected with SARS-CoV-2. The dozens of small, blue spheres emerging from the surface are the virus particles themselves. (The images produced by the electron microscopes are black-and-white, so Fischer hands them over to visual artists who colorize the image to help identify different parts of the cell and to distinguish the virus from its host.)

“This image gives us a window into how devastatingly effective SARS-CoV-2 appears to be at co-opting a host’s cellular machinery,” Collins wrote. “Just one infected cell is capable of releasing thousands of new virus particles that can, in turn, be transmitted to others.”

Scientists like Fischer have used electron microscopes to uncover the unseen world of viruses and bacteria dating to the 1930s. In the past two decades, however, new technologies have unleashed a resolution revolution, allowing researchers to see down to the near-atomic level. Microscopists have come up with better ways to prepare samples for viewing and have written sophisticated software programs to sharpen images.

Elizabeth Fischer uses an electron microscope to capture images of the coronavirus, which is about 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. “I like to get images out there to try to convey that this is an entity, to try to demystify it, so this is something more tangible for people,†Fischer says. (Courtesy of Elizabeth Fischer)
Courtesy of Elizabeth Fischer

Through her lab, Fischer receives samples from all over the world, and was sent viral material from SARS-CoV-2 in early February from one of the first U.S. patients to be infected. Often, her samples come from vials that have been stored in a freezer for decades, or from cultures routinely grown in a lab. “It’s very sobering when you know it came from a human patient.”

For example, in 2014, a sister lab in Mali sent over an Ebola sample from a 2-year-old girl who had lived in Guinea when her mother died of the disease. Her grandmother traveled from Mali to attend the funeral, which involved touching and bathing the body, and to take the girl home with her. Both got infected and brought the virus back with them as they returned to Mali by public transportation. They both died.

In 2014, Elizabeth Fischer received a sample of Ebola from a 2-year-old girl in Mali. The cell border and nucleus shape resemble the shape of Africa. (Courtesy of Elizabeth Fischer)
Courtesy of Elizabeth FischerIn 2014, Fischer received a sample of Ebola from a 2-year-old girl in Mali. The cell border and nucleus shape resemble the shape of Africa.

“This one particular cell, it looked like the continent of Africa,” Fischer recalls. “It was a very powerful moment. You see that virus growing in there, it takes you back around to not only the lab work we do, but that there’s an impact on human health.”

Despite viruses’s deadly nature, she still appreciates the “beautiful symmetry in many of them,” she says: “They’re very elegant, and they’re not malicious in and of themselves. They’re just doing what they do.”


Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

martes, 19 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: Annie Glenn, Famed Astronaut’s Widow, Dies of Coronavirus Complications at Age 100 Annie Glenn, Famed Astronaut’s Widow, Dies of Coronavirus Complications at Age 100



(COLUMBUS, Ohio) — Annie Glenn, wife of the late astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn who overcame a childhood stutter to become an advocate for others with speech disorders, died Tuesday of complications from COVID-19. She was 100.

Glenn died at a nursing home near St. Paul, Minnesota, where she’d moved in recent years to be near her daughter, said Hank Wilson, a spokesman for the Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine also announced Glenn’s death, the latest among centenarians succumbing rapidly to the new coronavirus.

John Glenn died in 2016 following an extraordinary career that included breaking the transcontinental speed record, becoming the first American to orbit Earth and serving as a Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio. At the time of his death, he and Annie had been married 73 years.

The relationship was “the stuff of fairy tales and one of the great love stories of all time,” Dale Butland, the senator’s former speechwriter and chief of staff, said in a statement Tuesday.

“During WW II, the Korean war and two flights into outer space, Annie patiently waited for her John to come home,” Butland said. “Since December of 2016, John’s been patiently waiting for his Annie. Today, they’re both where they always wanted to be: together — for all eternity.”

Annie Glenn was thrust into the spotlight in 1962, when her husband made his famous space flight. She shied away from the media attention because of a severe stutter.

Later, she underwent an intensive program at the Communications Research Institute at Hollins College, now Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia, that gave her the skills to control her stutter and to speak in public.

By the time 77-year-old John Glenn returned to space in 1998 aboard space shuttle Discovery, Annie showed she had become comfortable in her public role when she acknowledged that she had reservations about the retired senator’s second flight.

“John had announced one year before that he was going to retire as a senator, so I was looking forward to having him as my own because I had given him to our government for 55 years,” she told a NASA interviewer.

Her career in advocacy for those with communication disorders included service on the advisory boards of numerous child abuse and speech and hearing organizations. The Annie Glenn Award was created to honor individuals who overcome a communication disorder.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown said Annie Glenn “made Ohio proud all her life.”

“Annie will be remembered for her work to lift others up, including those who shared her struggles with communicative disorders,” he said in a statement. “Her passion for helping others, along with a kind spirit and sharp wit, endeared Annie to anyone who met her.”

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called Glenn “our most beloved Ohioan.”

“She represented all that is good about our country,” he said in a statement.

In 1998, Defense Secretary William Cohen honored Annie Glenn with the Department of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. He called her “a hero in her own right” and praised her for being “a strong voice for children, speech and communications, and the disabled.”

In 2009, Glenn received an honorary doctorate of public service from Ohio State, where she served as an adjunct professor of speech pathology in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science. The department bestows an Annie Glenn Leadership Award annually.

Glenn was born Anna Margaret Castor on Feb. 17, 1920, in Columbus. She met her husband while they were children growing up in New Concord. She was offered an organ scholarship to The Juilliard School, but World War II began and John proposed — so she decided to stay with him, according to a biography on the Glenn College’s website. The high school sweethearts attended Muskingum College and were married in 1943. They had two children, David and Lyn, who both survive.

The Glenns served on the board of trustees of the college, now Muskingum University, and Annie Glenn was named a distinguished alumni fellow in speech communications at the school.

A virtual memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on June 6, Wilson said. The service will be officiated by the Rev. Amy Miracle, pastor for the Broad Street Presbyterian Church in Columbus. The memorial will be virtual with no parishioners or guests in attendance due to the COVID-19 restrictions.

domingo, 17 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: U.S. Military’s Mystery Space Plane Rockets Back Into Orbit U.S. Military’s Mystery Space Plane Rockets Back Into Orbit



(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — The U.S. military’s mystery space plane rocketed into orbit again Sunday, this time with an extra load of science experiments.

It’s the sixth flight of an X-37B, a solar-powered plane that’s flown by remote control without a crew.

Officials aren’t saying how long the spacecraft will remain in orbit this time or the purpose of the mission. But a senior vice president for X-37B developer Boeing, Jim Chilton, noted each mission has been progressively longer.

The previous mission lasted a record two years, with a touchdown shrouded in darkness at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center last year.

The winged spacecraft resembles NASA’s old shuttles, but is just one-quarter the size at 29 feet (9 meters) long. The one just launched features an extra compartment for experiments, including several for NASA and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, making it the biggest science load yet for an X-37B.

The Air Force has two of these reusable space planes. Their home base is a former space shuttle hangar at Kennedy.

“You could say that the X-37B stands on the shoulders of the space shuttle,” Chilton said. “From a common shape to a common home.”

Since the first flight in 2010, the secretive space planes had logged a combined 2,865 days in orbit as of Sunday.

“If you add up all the missions, just under eight years in orbit and 1 billion miles, so a lot of traveling by this machine,” Chilton said during the launch broadcast.

Delayed a day by bad weather, this marked just the second rocket launch for the newly established Space Force. In March, it hoisted a national security satellite.

United Launch Alliance, which provided the Atlas V rocket, declared success 1 1/2 hours after liftoff. It dedicated Sunday’s launch to the health care workers and others who are working on the front lines of the pandemic.

The company said it followed health advice for the launch. Many of the flight controllers wore masks and were spread out.

Precautions were less evident along area causeways, where spectators parked to watch the Atlas soar. Thick, low clouds spoiled the show.

The Cape Canaveral Air Force Station has an exceptionally fast turnaround for its next launch.

Before dawn Tuesday, SpaceX will attempt to launch another batch of its Starlink satellites for global internet service. It will be SpaceX’s last flight before its first astronaut launch, scheduled for May 27 from next-door Kennedy Space Center.

___

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

sábado, 16 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: Humpback Whales Have Made a Remarkable Recovery, Giving Us Hope for the Planet Humpback Whales Have Made a Remarkable Recovery, Giving Us Hope for the Planet



In the depths of the ocean, and out of sight for most of us, there’s a quiet miracle happening. Many humpback whale populations, previously devastated by commercial whaling, are making a comeback. And no, before you ask, this has nothing to do with the coronavirus.

A recent study on humpbacks that breed off the coast of Brazil and call Antarctic waters home during the summer has shown that these whales can now be found in the sort of numbers seen before the days of whaling. Records suggest that in the 1830s there were around 27,000 whales but, after heavy hunting, by the mid-1950s only 450 remained.

It is reassuring to see what happens when we leave nature to follow its course. The ban of commercial whaling in 1986 led to a strong recovery and now this population is thought to be around 93% of its original size. By taking away the threat of hunting, and having safe spaces to survive and thrive, humpback numbers in many areas have recovered.

This is great news for the whales, of course, but also for the climate. Keeping carbon out of the atmosphere is key to tackling the climate crisis and the contribution that a single whale can make is something we need to take seriously.

On average a single whale stores around 33 tonnes of CO2. If we consider only the Antarctic humpback whales that breed in Brazil, protecting this population alone has resulted in 813,780 tonnes of CO2 being stored in the deep sea. That’s around twice the yearly CO2 emissions of a small country like Bermuda or Belize, according to 2018 emissions data. That’s because when a whale dies naturally, it exports carbon stored in its gigantic body to the deep sea, keeping it locked up for centuries.

In 2019, even the International Monetary Fund turned its attention to the startling economics of whale conservation. Apparently, one great whale is worth around US$ 2 million over its lifetime and the organisation GRID-Arendal goes as far as stating that whales are worth US$ 1 trillion to the global economy.

I had the privilege to see them flourishing during the last leg of Greenpeace’s year-long Pole to Pole voyage. I’m happy to say that whales are everywhere in Antarctic waters. My cabin mate, a teetotaler, woke up a few mornings with a “whale hangover” having stayed up too late watching whales feeding off the bow of our ship.

As a whale biologist, for decades I have always remembered the tales told by old whalers in the communities I have lived and worked – from Shetland to the Azores, New Zealand and New Caledonia – where, back in the day, there were so many whales you could walk right across a bay on the backs of humpbacks. Or so they said. My experience in the Antarctic made me think of these tales and gives me hope that we can work towards recovery of other populations and species, for everyone to enjoy, not just the privileged few like me.

Humpbacks are probably the world’s most recognisable whale and they perform the longest known migration of any mammal. And each one is utterly unique: the pattern of white and black blotches on the underside of their tail fluke is as individual as a human fingerprint. Comparing our images with a global database of humpbacks, we were able to identify 49 humpback whales whilst on the Greenpeace expedition. All humpbacks in their feeding grounds are busy and are trying to get fat.

Humpback Whales In Antarctica
© Abbie Trayler-Smith / Greenpeace. Humpback whales approach a Greenpeace RHIB off Cuverville Island during whale identification and hydrophone work in the Errera Channel, Antarctica.

One of them was formerly known as ‘HW-MN1300988’ and now named ‘Mir’ by our team after our radio operator whose birthday it was when we heard of an exciting match. Mir was first identified in 2012 off the Pacific Coast of Panama, and has been photographed returning to Antarctic waters in three subsequent summers, providing direct evidence of how these whales cover extensive areas of the oceans. These data can help us understand just how far these magnificent creatures travel and how much ocean they depend on.

Of course, it’s not all great news. Some whales are still being hunted. Some species, such as blue whales have not yet recovered from the impact of commercial whaling. They all face a myriad of interacting human-induced threats – ocean noise, chemical and plastic pollution, collisions with ships, entanglement in fishing nets, poor fisheries management and climate change. It’s tough out there for marine life. One of the humpbacks we identified during our Antarctic expedition, ‘HW-MN1301140’ had as a distinct characteristic only half a tail fluke, possibly as a result of entanglement with fishing gear.

The humpback recovery in Antarctic waters is also an example of what can happen when governments come together to protect our global oceans. The moratorium on whaling was followed by the creation of “whale sanctuaries” and regulation on trade in endangered species. We have the tools and the science. All we are missing is the political will to create the spaces to allow wildlife to recover.

We know the ocean can be restored. Right now we are at an important crossroads for making that happen: it’s a grand challenge but we stand to lose so much if we ignore it. A recent review in the journal Nature suggests that if the oceans are protected, marine life can rebound within our lifetime. Whales are one example, others include turtles, sea otters, seals and, critically for humans, fisheries. Protection means a well-connected, well-managed network of marine protected areas, in the form of a global network of marine reserve areas that cover 30% of the ocean and allow marine life to flourish. The science is clear: this can happen and it will work.

Who knows whether all those old historical tales of humpbacks in every coastal bay are true, but I am excited to find out.

viernes, 15 de mayo de 2020

New story in Science and Health from Time: A Vaccine Against COVID-19 Would Be the Latest Success in a Long Scientific History A Vaccine Against COVID-19 Would Be the Latest Success in a Long Scientific History



Here’s betting you wouldn’t want anyone blowing smallpox scabs up your nose. But you might feel differently if you lived in 15th century China.

Long ago, the Chinese recognized that people who had contracted smallpox once were immune to reinfection. They came up with the idea of preserving scabs from individuals who had suffered mild cases, drying them out, crushing them to a powder and blowing them up the nostril. For boys it was the right nostril, for girls it was the left because, well, 15th century.

That is how the story of vaccines usually begins, though that version is decidedly incomplete. For one thing, it’s unclear how effective the early efforts at inoculation were. For another, no one knows just when the practice began, with some accounts pegging the date as long ago as 200 BCE. Scattered, less reliable stories of similar vaccination efforts have been reported in India and Africa too, but the evidence there is much thinner. So hat tip to Ming dynasty China, which apparently got the vaccine bandwagon rolling.

Vaccination is much on the world’s collective mind today as researchers at pharmaceutical companies and universities race to develop a way to prevent the continued spread of COVID-19. The most optimistic projections suggest a vaccine could be in hand by January; other, more cautious predictions see a wait of at least 18 months.

But in the long arc of vaccine history, even 18 months is something close to light-speed. Whatever is eventually developed will owe its existence to centuries of incremental work that have turned vaccination from a crude and often risky practice to a highly refined science.

Edward Jenner Takes on Smallpox

If the Chinese were first out of the gate in attempting to develop a vaccine against smallpox, it is 18th century British physician Edward Jenner who is credited with developing the first safe and reliable version.

Jenner, like others of his time, had noticed that milkmaids who as a result of their work had contracted cases of cowpox, a disease that could be transferred from cattle to humans, would typically be spared smallpox infection whenever there was a local outbreak. Cowpox was apparently dissimilar enough from smallpox to cause only comparatively mild symptoms in people but similar enough to confer immunity against the human form of the disease.

In a celebrated experiment in 1796—though it would hardly pass ethical muster today—Jenner harvested bits of a cowpox pustule from a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and scratched it into the arm of an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps, on May 14, 1796.

Dr.Edward Jenner Vaccinating Young Boy
Bettmann Archive/Getty ImagesDr. Edward Jenner (1749-1823) performing his first vaccination on James Phipps on May 14, 1796. Painting by E. Board in the Welcome Museum, London. Undated painting.

After, he attempted to infect Phipps with human smallpox, but the boy simply shook off the virus. Two year later, Jenner published his results in a book that went by the less-than-reader-friendly title An inquiry into the causes and effects of the variolae vaccinae: a disease discovered in some of the western counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire, and known by the name of the cow pox. Still, the content—if not the marketing plan—was a sensation. By 1801, an estimated 100,000 people had been vaccinated using the same method.

To Weaken or to Kill?

But Jenner’s approach had its limits: not every human disease has an animal analog that can confer immunity without causing the disease itself. And some animal diseases that do jump to humans can be deadly to both species—like COVID-19 itself, which is thought to have come to us via bats. The trick then became to work with the viruses and bacteria that do cause human disease, but to disarm them somehow, to strip them of their power to sicken while still teaching the immune system to recognize and neutralize them in the event of an actual later infection.

Scientists realized that there was not just a single way to achieve that goal, there were two: They could kill the virus or bacterium while keeping its physical remains intact—effectively teaching the body to recognize a mannequin of the pathogen and mount an immune response if it ever saw a live one. In the alternative, they could attenuate—or weaken, but not kill—the bug, rendering it harmless but similarly teaching the immune system what to look for and kill the next time.

Over the course of the century and a half that followed Jenner’s work, multiple diseases were contained using one or both of these methods.

In 1881 and 1885, French biologist Louis Pasteur developed successful vaccines against anthrax and rabies respectively, exposing the pathogens to oxygen and heat and weakening but not killing them. In the early 20th century, French physician Albert Calmette and veterinarian Camille Guérin developed a tuberculosis vaccine, similarly weakening a bovine strain of the bacterium by passing 230 generations of it through artificial growth mediums, selecting for weaker and weaker versions with each passage.

Vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella were initially developed with attenuated viral strains, as well. In the case of rubella, the work was done partly by developing a strain of the virus that thrived at temperatures only below 37ºC (98.6ºF), making the human body an inhospitable place for it to be.

The problem with attenuated viruses is that mutations are possible—and in some rare cases the vaccine can cause the disease instead of preventing it. For this reason, 19th and 20th century researchers developed vaccines against cholera, pertussis, influenza and more by killing the pathogen entirely, either via heat or formalin, a diluted version of formaldehyde.

Jonas Salk’s breakthrough polio vaccine, approved in 1955, was based on formalin-killed poliovirus. Albert Sabin’s later, 1962 version used an attenuated strain. The advantage of Salk’s: it could never cause a case of vaccine-induced polio. The advantage of Sabin’s: it was an oral vaccine instead of an injectable one like Salk’s, making it possible for field workers—not trained medical personnel—to oversee mass immunization. (Despite the exceedingly rare cases of vaccine-derived polio, attenuated-virus vaccines present only a vanishingly small risk to health—smaller than the risk of going unvaccinated—though people with compromised immune systems, organ transplants or other underlying health problems should consult with their physicians before being vaccinated.)

In the late 1940s and beyond scientists got cleverer still, using just bits of the casings of viruses and bacteria to trigger an immune response—a bit like allowing a dog to sniff an article of clothing belonging to a missing person and then sending it on the hunt. Proteins extracted from pathogens could work similarly, each one carrying a chemical fingerprint that all by itself could teach the immune system to recognize and kill the wild virus or bacterium from which it originated.

The Next Vaccine

More recently, as genomes became readily decodable, researchers have grown adept at developing vaccines that rely on extracting RNA or DNA from pathogens and injecting these into the body. There, the bits of genetic material cause cells to produce proteins that cannot cause disease but can sensitize and educate the immune system.

A mural painting depicting two figures of Saint Gennaro,
Salvatore Laporta—KONTROLAB/LightRocket via Getty ImagesA mural depicting two figures of Saint Gennaro, patron of Naples, with a protective mask and an ampule with the label “The vaccine” written in Napolitan on a wall in the city’s downtown, on May 11, 2020.

In the case of COVID-19, Moderna Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Mass., is making progress with just this kind of approach. There, researchers are working on a vaccine that uses the genetic material known as mRNA—which codes for proteins—extracted from SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

“mRNA is really like a software molecule in biology,” Moderna’s president, Dr. Stephen Hoge, told TIME’s Alice Park in late January, just as the pandemic was gaining momentum. “So our vaccine is like the software program to the body, which then goes and makes the [viral] proteins that can generate an immune response.” Other groups working on COVID-19 vaccines include CanSino Biologics, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, and a collaboration between Oxford University and AstraZeneca.

Whether Moderna’s vaccine or others ultimately bring COVID-19 to heel, humanity’s centuries of success in developing vaccines means that today few people doubt that a safe, effective inoculation can be found. And as novel viruses continue to emerge, the vaccine arsenal will inevitably grow.

Pathogens are mindless but relentless. But science is relentless too. Like any arms race, this one does involve loss of lives. But over time, as research progresses, many millions more are saved.