Jeff Bezos fastens his seat belt for space odyssey
WASHINGTON: Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, is set to join the astronaut club on Tuesday on the first crewed launch by Blue Origin, another key moment in a big month for the space tourism industry.
The mission comes days after Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson crossed the final frontier, narrowly besting the Amazon magnate in their battle of the billionaires.
Blue Origin’s sights are, however, set higher: both literally in terms of the altitude to which its reusable New Shepard craft will ascend compared to Virgin’s spaceplane, but also in its future ambitions.
“They’ve had 15 successful New Shepard uncrewed flights and we’ve been waiting years to see when they’re going to start flying people,” Laura Forczyk, founder of space consulting firm Astralytical, told AFP.
New Shepard will blast off at 8am on July 20 from a remote facility in the west Texas desert called Launch Site One, some 40km north of the nearest town, Van Horn. The event will be live-streamed on Blue Origin’s official website.
Joining Bezos on the fully autonomous flight will be barrier-breaking woman aviator Wally Funk, who at 82 is set to be the oldest ever astronaut, and Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen, the company’s first paying customer, who will become the youngest astronaut. Rounding out the four-member crew is Jeff Bezos’s brother Mark Bezos.
After lift-off, New Shepard will accelerate towards space at speeds exceeding Mach 3. The capsule will then separate from its booster, and the astronauts unbuckle and begin to experience weightlessness. They will spend a few minutes beyond the Karman line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, at 100km, as the spacecraft peaks at 106km high.
The booster will return autonomously to a landing pad just north of its launch site, while the capsule free-falls back to Earth before deploying three giant parachutes to land gently in the west Texas desert.
While Ghaziabad-based Gram Pathshala’s movement’s objective is to give village students a convivial space to study, Noida-based organisation, Sarvahitey’s project Paper Bridge, aims to set up 1,000 libraries with the larger objective “to unify India culturally” and reduce a sense of alienation among the geographically isolated communities. Prem Prakash, the co-founder of Paper Bridge, says the organisation has set up over 300 libraries in villages in 11 states of the country, including the Northeast and Kashmir. “We have also set up about 150 libraries in the Naxalaffected rural areas of Jharkhand,” he says.
The organisation runs book donation drives at schools, colleges, corporate houses and has so far collected over 200,000 books. “We encourage people donating books to write a message on them for the people in the region where the books are destined. These messages act as a soft bridge between people; that is why we have named the project Paper Bridge,” he adds.
Among the villages where libraries have come up in the past few years, the most famous is Bhilar, near Mahabaleshwar in Maharashtra. Famous as ‘Pustakanche Gaav’ or ‘Village of Books’, almost every house in this quaint hilly village has a library with about 1,000 books on a particular theme such as history, novel, short story, sports, among others. Large murals on the walls of the house depict the theme of the library it houses.
The libraries in the village, also known as India’s Hay-onwye, after the famous Welsh village in the UK known for its literary festival, is a project started by the Maharashtra government in 2017 with the objective of promoting Marathi literature. “We provide books, shelves, tables and chairs to set up libraries in the drawing rooms of these houses. The villagers do not charge us any rent and are welcoming hosts. We keep adding new books to the collection,” says Vinay Mavlankar, the project manager, whose office is located in the Bhilar village, which also organises gala cultural and literary programmes.
“Before Covid-19, we used to receive about 10 visitors a day. The library is part of our house, and so we get an opportunity to have long conversations with visitors about their lives, and literature, enhancing our understanding of other parts of the country and deepening our knowledge of books,” says Vaibhav Bhilare, whose house in the village is titled Kadambari-2, which is home to a library with Marathi novels.
Bhilar has inspired many villages across the country.
One of them is in Perumkulam, near Kollam, in Kerala. The villagers have put several sloped-roof, house-shaped glass bookshelves, with about 50 books each, across the village. Last year, well-known Malayalam writer MT Vasudevan Nair declared it a “village of books”.
In the neighbouring Tamil Nadu, in the past few years, Shiva Shankar, a former professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute and Asai Thambi Replong, English Literature professor at Pachaiyappa’s College, in Chennai, have been on a mission to set up libraries in Dalit villages across the state. So far, they have set up, 18 libraries in 15 districts, all of them with over 3,000 books. “We wish to create equitable opportunities for rural children and students, and our primary focus are Dalits. We approach the villages and all we ask for is a room in a public or private space and volunteers to run the libraries after we set it up. We want to create at least 100 libraries. Libraries, we believe, are an effective tool of social inclusion and empowerment,” says Replong.
Agrees, Lal Bahar, the man who started the village library movement in western UP. “Libraries can be the key to the social, educational and cultural revival of villages,” he says. “Earlier, in our village when an elderly person saw a youngster loitering around, he would say, ‘what are you doing here, go home; now the elderly villager says, ‘do not waste your time, go to the library.”
crushed the houses with people sleeping inside. Rescuers were seen trying to dig through the debris using their hands in an attempt to find survivors, and officials said they feared more people may still be trapped. A 16-year-old boy was killed in a house collapse in the city’s Bhandup suburb, while one man was electrocuted to death in Andheri West, officials said.
The first landslide was reported around 1am in the New Bharat Nagar area of Chembur, where a wall collapsed on several shanties. Around five houses, where people were sleeping, were the ones worst effected and a total of 19 people were killed, including four minors. Five people were reported wounded in the incident.
Around 3am, another landslide was reported in the Surya Nagar area of Vikhroli, where seven-to-eight houses were crushed, resulting in the death of at least 10 people, officials said.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) termed both the landslides as “natural calamities”, and said that the houses were “illegally built” on government land and that it had already appealed to citizens to vacate.
Officials from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), municipal workers, fire brigade and police personnel were engaged in rescue operations at the collapse sites.
At around 5am, a house collapse in Bhandup resulted in the death of a 16-year-old, officials said.
Also at Bhandup, rainwater inundated a water purification complex, disrupting supply “in most of the parts of Mumbai”, civic authorities said. “Efforts are being taken to restore Mumbai’s water supply by restarting the water purification system in the complex... After supply is restored, the administration appeals Mumbaikars to boil water before drinking,” BMC said in a statement on Sunday afternoon.
Later on Sunday morning, 26-year-old man was reportedly electrocuted to his death in a sweet shop at Andheri West.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted his condolences and announced a compensation of ₹2 lakh to the families of those who died. State chief minister Uddhav Thackeray also announced a compensation of ₹5 lakh for those who lost their family members on Sunday.
The BJP on the other hand said blamed the alleged “mismanagement and corruption” in the BMC. Vinod Mishra, BJP corporator and party leader in the BMC said, “The BMC should stop playing with lives of citizens and every year we have this situation where people die during monsoon. The BMC should ensure that there are no such incidents during heavy rainfall.”
State environment minister Aadtiya Thackeray labelled the event as a “mini cloudburst,” though the India Meteorological Department (IMD) did not term it as one. Experts said it was a thunderstorm event, but one whose impact is comparable to a cloudburst – which is described by IMD as an event where 100mm rain falls in a span of an hour over a 20-30sqkm region.
“We have been talking about climate change and it is happening because since a few years we have been witnessing that in a few hours, excess rainfall is reported, which makes it even more for the administration to handle,” he said.
Meteorologists said in Sunday’s thunderstorm, the cloud cover seems to have started forming late Saturday over Raigad district, where the hilly topography would have driven the formation of thunder clouds. The cloud cover – which touched a height of 18km (twice the size of Mt Everest) – then moved from the southeast to the northwest of Mumbai.
“The cloud-top height is a good indicator of how intense a storm will be. Furthermore, the vertical wind shear is significant, which is prolonging the lifespan of thunderstorms,” Akshay Deoras, independent meteorologist and PHD researcher at the University of Reading, England. “Such thunderstorms are definitely uncommon for Mumbai or the west coast during an active phase of the monsoon, and in a month like July. The cloud top height of this monster thunderstorm is definitely comparable to the one that produced rains on 26 July 2005.”
Despite the scale of the downpour, civic authorities said they received no warning of extreme weather from the IMD. “Our models did not see such an intense event, but an impact based forecast was put out at 1am warning people,” said Dr Jayanta Sarkar, head of the IMD’S regional meteorological centre in Mumbai.