Jerry Springer dies aged 79

Mechanical SpaceX arms catch returning Starship rocket booster at landing pad

SpaceX has launched its enormous Starship rocket on its boldest test flight yet, catching the returning booster back at the pad with mechanical arms. Towering almost 400 feet, the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after lift-off or while ditching into the sea. The last one in June was the most successful yet, completing its flight without exploding. This time, SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk upped the challenge and risk. The company brought the first-stage booster back to land at the pad from which it had soared seven minutes earlier. The launch tower sported monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, that caught the descending 232-ft booster. “The tower has caught the rocket!!” Mr Musk said via X. Company employees screamed in joy as the booster slowly lowered itself into the launch tower’s arms. “Even in this day and age, what we just saw is magic,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot observed from near the launch site. “I am shaking right now.” “This is a day for the engineering history books,” added SpaceX’s Kate Tice, from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. It was up to the flight director to decide, in real time with a manual control, whether to attempt the landing. SpaceX said both the booster and launch tower had to be in a good, stable condition. Otherwise, it was going to end up in the gulf like the previous ones. Everything was judged to be ready for the catch. Once free of the booster, the retro-looking stainless steel spacecraft on top continued around the world, targeting a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The June flight came up short at the end after pieces came off. SpaceX upgraded the software and reworked the heat shield, improving the thermal tiles. SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California. But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads – not on them. Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Mr Musk intends to do the same for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone. Nasa has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX intends to use Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually, Mars. Published: 13/10/2024 by Radio NewsHub

Tory leadership contender Jenrick defends changing stance on Brexit

Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick defended changing his stance on Brexit, when asked about a letter he is said to have signed describing it as a “dystopia”. Mr Jenrick voted to remain in the EU in the Brexit referendum but later backed leaving the bloc. A viewer sent in a question to Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg asking whether he agreed with the contents of a letter he had signed at the time of the referendum saying that leaving the EU would “lead us into a dystopia”. “Well, I don’t remember that letter, but my view has changed absolutely. “But I was concerned that it would prove difficult for the British state to realise all the benefits of Brexit, and in some respects, I’ve been justified in that regard. “We’ve had a great deal of economic and constitutional disruption as a result of leaving the European Union, but I don’t think we’ve gained all of the benefits, and that’s what I want to see.” Nicknamed “Robert Generic” when first elected to the Commons in 2014 for his apparently moderate politics, Mr Jenrick has gradually moved to the right of the Tory Party. He told Laura Kuenssberg that leaving the EU had given the UK “the ability to control our borders and to have a proper philosophy as a country on our immigration system” but that after the 2019 election, the Tory Government “created an immigration system which was even more liberal than the one we had in the EU”. The MP for Newark resigned as immigration minister last December, claiming legislation designed to revive the former Rwanda deportation policy did “not go far enough”. In his pitch to Tories to replace Rishi Sunak as leader, he has advocated for leaving the European Convention on Human Rights as a way to tackle immigration. He told Laura Kuenssberg that the Good Friday agreement is “not reliant upon the ECHR”. MPs were told by the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee earlier this year that it is “unlikely the UK could withdraw from the ECHR without triggering a review procedure built into the Good Friday Agreement”. Mr Jenrick has said he would make Jacob Rees-Mogg, who lost his seat in the July election, Conservative Party chairman. Both of the two final Tory leadership contenders lean to the right of the party, as Mr Jenrick is set to face off against Kemi Badenoch. The Tory Reform Group (TRG) of centrist Tories has refused to endorse either of them. James Cleverly, a candidate who urged the party to be “more normal” in his pitch to members at party conference, was knocked out of the race in the final ballot of MPs this week. There has been speculation that Mr Cleverly, who had topped a ballot a day before he was eliminated, was the victim of coordinated vote-sharing that backfired. Shadow work and pensions secretary Mel Stride told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips that because it is a secret ballot, he cannot be certain what happened. “But it does seem to me that at the very least, a number of individual MPs decided that they would play games, that they would try and engineer the final two that they wanted to see, rather than focusing on the person that they actually wanted ultimately to be leader. “And I think it does expose questions about whether that is the right electoral process for the party in the future.” The new leader will be announced on November 2 after a ballot of the whole party membership is held. Published: 13/10/2024 by Radio NewsHub

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Jerry Springer dies aged 79

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Mechanical SpaceX arms catch returning Starship rocket booster at landing pad

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