Daily Archives: December 28, 2022


NASA Mulls SpaceX Backup Plan for Crew of Russia’s Leaky Soyuz Ship

NASA is exploring whether SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft can potentially offer an alternative ride home for some crew members of the International Space Station after a Russian capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbital lab. NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, are investigating the cause of a punctured coolant line on an external radiator of Russia’s Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which is supposed to return its crew of two cosmonauts and one U.S. astronaut to Earth early next year. But the December 14 leak, which emptied the Soyuz …


Italy to Screen All China Arrivals for COVID

Italy is making coronavirus tests for visitors from China mandatory following an explosion in cases in China, the health minister said Wednesday. “I have ordered mandatory COVID-19 antigenic swabs, and related virus sequencing, for all passengers coming from China and transiting through Italy,” minister Orazio Schillaci said. The measure was “essential to ensure the surveillance and identification of any variants of the virus in order to protect the Italian population”, he said. Coronavirus infections have surged in China as it unwinds hardline controls that had torpedoed the economy and sparked …


Americans Weigh Pros and Cons as Musk Alters Twitter

Marie Rodriguez of Bountiful, Utah, began using social media when she enlisted in the U.S. Navy. At first, she saw it as a positive thing. “It helped me to really keep in touch with people at home while I was deployed and living overseas,” she told VOA. However, in the two months since Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Rodriguez and many of its hundreds of millions of users have been forced to reevaluate their feelings about the platform and about social media in general. “I don’t think he’s been …