07 May 2020
Something In The Air
But it’s not us.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Ok, so we’re not flying anywhere, not now or any time in the near future, what with lockdown and airlines mothballing their fleets on out-of-the-way airfields and fearing they’ll go bust long before our grounded economy takes off again. But that doesn’t mean the skies are empty, does it?
No, indeed. This week, the air above us (cleaner than it has been for decades – less and less fossil fuels are being burned thanks to the slump in demand for energy, and more and more wind-power and sun-power is being harvested thanks to unseasonably-clear skies and seasonable gusts) has been full of whole flapping flocks of newsworthy stories.
The large tortoiseshell butterfly is making a comeback in the UK where it was virtually extinct fifty years ago; the white stalk is laying eggs here for the first time in six centuries; the peregrines nesting in Salisbury cathedral have become internet stars via webcam reality-tv; flamingos and pelicans are flocking to the Adriatic in unprecedented numbers; the scarlet macaw has been saved from extinction in Honduras; satellite tracking has shown that sea eagles regularly cover more than 100 miles a day, as the crow(?) flies, across Britain; a tagged cuckoo has just arrived in Suffolk having flown from West Africa – 4000 miles! – in just one week.
Nature also does sinister, of course – the giant Asiatic ‘murder hornet’ is on the loose in the USA, threatening the lives of bees and human beings alike. And imported queen bees are apparently spreading deadly viruses to UK swarms. Nature does weird, too (with the help of man); even fish have taken to the skies in Canada, where conservationists are firing salmon from a canon at 22mph to get them up and over otherwise insurmountable obstacles on the way to their spawning grounds.
But the coronavirus and the lockdown doesn’t mean that dumb nature has a monopoly of the skies. Far from it. Homo sapiens is still chucking stuff up there. Reports of Israeli rocket attacks on Hezbollah targets in Syria and of RAF bombing raids on Isis targets in Iraq remind us that armed conflict continues around the world in spite of the pandemic. Chinese media has gone into overdrive this week in announcing Beijing’s beefed-up military power, including the development of a new stealth bomber, the Xian H-20, which can be armed with either nuclear or conventional missiles, will be able to fly 5000 miles without refuelling and will be undetectable by most radar systems.
China also announced the latest development in its space programme – the successful launch of its Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre on the island of Hainan, delivering an unmanned payload (including a test capsule capable of carrying a crew of six) into orbit. Although China hasn’t undertaken any manned space missions since 2016, and although the 3B and 7A rockets failed earlier this year, this launch puts China back on track to achieve its goals of building a manned space station within two years and landing men on the Moon within ten years. Beijing also plans to use the Long March 5 to deliver a rover to the planet Mars this summer.
The announcement of the Long March launch vied for headline attention with news about the imminent rebirth of the USA as a space power. Later this month, a new craft built and designed in the USA will take US astronauts into space for the first time in years, thus ending a decade of having to hitch expensive and humiliating rides on Russian crafts to and from the International Space Station. Nasa, in partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, will send two men into space in a Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s the beginning of a new programme with which Nasa plans to return astronauts to the moon in 2024 and land men on Mars by 2040.
Nasa has put the design and construction of a lunar lander out to tender and this week it announced awards totalling almost a billion dollars to three short-listed companies. This ‘semi-privatisation’ of space travel is a new and exciting development (SpaceX isn’t the only player – Boeing and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have also ventured into the game), leading to big technical breakthroughs and significant cost savings. Curiously, Moscow has objected to the arrangement and has accused the US state of “subsidising” Elon Musk’s private company – Russia is of course famous for its clear separation of the state and the private sector and would never dream of exploiting an unfair advantage by mixing the two together. Elon Musk has replied to the accusation by pointing out that his rocket is cheaper to run than the Russian’s not because of any subsidy but because it is re-usable.
Outer space isn’t letting homo sapiens have everything his (or her) own way, however. It’s retaliating by sending stuff into our own skies. Last Thursday morning, “a potentially hazardous asteroid” passed planet Earth in a “close approach” – a near miss, in other words – according to Nasa’s Centre For Near-Earth Object studies. The mile-and-a-half wide rocky projectile – known as 1998 OR2 – came within four million miles of us; and it will be back, even closer, in 2079. And last Monday, the Pentagon released video footage of three UFOs (sorry, UAPs – “unexplained aerial phenomena” – in US Navy parlance) recorded by supersonic jet fighter pilots from the US Naval Air Systems Command in recent years. (“What the fuck is that thing?” shouts one pilot in amazement. “Oh my gosh, dude, look at that flying!”)
But perhaps even more frightening and alarming is the news that Harrison Ford – movie star and keen pilot – is back in the skies. In 1999 he crashed a helicopter; in 2000 he crashed a six-seater plane in Nebraska; in 2015 he ended up in hospital after making an emergency landing on a golf course; in 2017 he landed on a taxiway instead of a runway at John Wayne Airport, missing a Boeing 737 preparing for take-off by less than 100 feet. And now he’s under investigation by the US Federal Aviation Administration for steering his light aircraft “across the runway at Hawthorne Municipal Airport on Friday afternoon while another aircraft was performing a touch-and-go landing”.
Oh, and there’s the case of Latvia’s missing drone. Have you seen it, by any chance? A 5.5m wide, 3.5m long, 26Kg drone disappeared during a test-flight last Saturday, soon after it was launched near Riga by the company which built it. It can remain airborne for 90 hours. Last seen flying at 600 feet, it has evaded attempts by three private planes, a military plane and mobile radars to find it. The authorities had to close the airspace over Riga International Airport, suspend flights below 19,500 all across the country and redirect an incoming flight from China to Tallinn airport in Estonia. The company has had its flight licence suspended.
Was Harrison Ford flying anywhere near Riga last Saturday? Have US Navy fighter pilots filmed any UAPs over the Baltic recently?
