He’s on the radio
Novelist hopes his show will blow away coronarelated blues.
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 nearly 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. With American shuttles no longer in use, the United States has had to rely on Russia for rides to the 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 at 4:33 p.m. EDT 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.
— Associated Press
‘Parenthood’ star’s videos go viral
Sarah Ramos always knew Dylan O’brien had the range.
The actress, best known for NBC’S “Parenthood,” went viral on Thursday after uploading a video in which she and O’brien reenacted the climax of David Fincher’s “The Social Network.” O’brien, who starred in MTV’S “Teen Wolf” and the “Maze Runner” films, played Eduardo Saverin, a role originally taken on by Andrew Garfield .Ramos pulled double duty as Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker. Borrowing the original script and score, the actors re-created the scene in which an irate Saverin, who is being pushed out of Facebook, threatens Zuckerberg by telling him to “lawyer up.”
The reenactment, shot from their respective homes, attracted tens of thousands of interactions on Twitter — and even caught the attention of Garfield, who wrote to his friend Lin-manuel Miranda that O’brien had “MURDERED it.” It was the latest in a series of videos Ramos has been uploading throughout quarantine, in which she and the occasional guest star reenact scenes that “feel symbolic to me, in some way.”
“It’s really crazy,” Ramos says. “As my fiance and I have mentioned, it’s crazy that we made this in our living room and then people are talking about it the next day. It makes me happy and proud.”
— Associated Press
Acclaimed novelist hosts radio show
Acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, hosting a special radio show from home, painted a brighter side of the world with his favorite music, and said the fight against the coronavirus is a challenge in figuring out ways to help and care for each other.
The 71-year-old, known for bestsellers such as “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Windup Bird Chronicle,” said Friday he hoped the show would “blow away some of the corona-related blues.”
Murakami opened the two-hour late night show “Murakami Radio Stay Home Special” with “Look for the Silver Lining” by the Modern Folk Quartet, followed by 16 other songs, selected from classical to jazz, pop and rock. Their common thread: smile, sunshine, rainbow, birthday memories and other happy sides of life.
Murakami said comparing the fight against the coronavirus to a war, as politicians often do, is inappropriate. “It’s a challenge for us to figure out how we can share our wisdom to cooperate, help each other and keep balance. It’s not a war to kill each other but a fight of wisdom to let us all live,” he said. “We don’t need enmity and hatred here.”
— Associated Press