Media Today

[Rick Plant]

President Joe Biden to give primetime speech from Independence Hall Thursday

President Biden's prime-time speech comes at time American democracy at "critical juncture"

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- President Joe Biden is scheduled to deliver a prime-time speech Thursday night from Independence Mall on what he calls "a battle for the soul of the nation." The president will deliver his speech beginning at 8 p.m. Thursday from the lawn before an invitation-only crowd.

The public will only be able to watch on TV, where he's expected to say that the country is at a critical moment right now. A political expert told us he agrees.

"I think it's at a critical juncture," professor Richardson Dilworth said, "which is in part why I don't think we've written the story of what American democracy is."

Dilworth is the director of the department of politics at Drexel University.

Looking at the state of American politics, he says the divisions are more than political theater

"The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are being reformulated with new forms of activists," Dilworth said, "and a new generation of voters and activists who have a very different sense of politics and political participation."

Dilworth says the country's political system is being tested by, among other things, gerrymandering, money and social media.

"The fact that this generation has grown up on social media gives them a very different sense of speech and the role of speech in politics," Dilworth said.

"I think the real potential for the United States is the ability to sustain a multi-cultural democracy," Dilworth said, "which is a real challenge and something that is relatively rare in the history of democracies."

The White House says the president's speech will last from 20 to 30 minutes.

While the president is in town, the National Park Service says some attractions will have shortened hours.

https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/president-biden-primetime-speech-philadelphia-democracy/

[Rick Plant]

Biden to address 'extremist threat to democracy' in prime-time speech

He is sharpening his attacks on "MAGA Republicans" as the midterms loom.



President Joe Biden on Thursday will speak in prime time about the "soul of the nation" as he ramps ups his political messaging ahead of the midterm elections this November.

Biden is set to make the remarks from outside Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia at 8 p.m. in what will be his second trip to the battleground state this week.

Biden will "speak about how the core values of this nation -- our standing in the world, our democracy -- are at stake," according to a White House official.

"He will talk about the progress we have made as a nation to protect our democracy, but how our rights and freedoms are still under attack," the official said. "And he will make clear who is fighting for those rights, fighting for those freedoms, and fighting for our democracy."

The ramped-up rhetoric appears to mirror Biden's 2020 messaging, in which he presented himself as a clear contrast to Donald Trump and the race itself as an inflection point for the nation.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Thursday's speech would be in the same vein as his messages to the nation after the Charlottesville clash involving white nationalists and on the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol.

Biden has repeatedly cited Charlottesville as the moment he decided he was going to run for president. In a 2017 article for the Atlantic, Biden said the deadly event was indicative that the "giant forward steps we have taken in recent years on civil liberties and civil rights and human rights are being met by a ferocious pushback from the oldest and darkest forces in America."

"You think about the battle continues, and so what the president believes, which is a reason to have this in prime time, is that there are an overwhelming amount of Americans, majority of Americans, who believe that we need to ... save the core values of our country," Jean-Pierre told ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Mary Bruce during Wednesday's press briefing.

"The president thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy," she said on Wednesday.

Jean-Pierre pointed to the Supreme Court's decision striking down abortion rights -- in which Justice Clarence Thomas called for the reconsideration of rulings involving same-sex marriage, contraception and other unenumerated rights -- as evidence the rights of Americans are in jeopardy.

Biden's speech Thursday comes after a stop in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, earlier this week, where he went after 'MAGA Republicans' for their response to the Jan. 6 attack and the FBI search at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.

"For God's sake, whose side are you on? Whose side are you on?" a fired-up Biden pressed as he made the case for his administration's plan for policing and crime prevention.

More criticisms of his Republican colleagues are likely in store, as Jean-Pierre said Biden views MAGA Republicans as the "most energized part of the Republican Party" and won't be "shy" about speaking out.

A White House official further previewing Biden's speech on Thursday said the president will address what he sees as the "direct threat to our democracy from MAGA Republicans, and the extremism that is a threat right now to our democratic values."

But the official insisted that despite Biden's criticisms, the prime-time address won't be about Trump.

"This is a speech about the American democracy," they said, noting Biden views the issue as one that should unite the American people. "It's an optimistic speech."

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-address-extremist-threat-democracy-prime-time-speech/story?id=89121094

[Rick Plant]

President Biden Delivers Remarks on Democracy From Philadelphia

President Biden delivers remarks on democracy in a primetime speech from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

Watch:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?522563-1/president-biden-delivers-remarks-democracy-philadelphia

[Rick Plant]

NASA will try to launch Artemis again on Saturday, Sept. 3



NASA will make its second attempt at launching its 'mega moon rocket' this Saturday (Sept. 3.), the space agency announced, just days after scrubbing the rocket's first liftoff attempt following an engine issue.

The Artemis 1 rocket is made up of the six-person Orion capsule perched atop the 30-story Space Launch System (SLS) — dubbed the 'mega moon rocket' — and was initially scheduled to embark on its maiden voyage to the moon and back on Monday (Aug. 29). But engineers were unable to cool one of the rocket's four core stage RS-25 engines down to a safe temperature in time for launch. That issue, along with poor weather conditions, forced NASA to cancel the launch just two minutes into the spacecraft's two-hour launch window, NASA officials said at a news conference on Tuesday (Aug. 30).

The rocket's new window for a second attempt will be on Sept 3., one day later than the earliest available window of Friday (Sept. 2.), which NASA ruled out due to a high risk of adverse weather conditions.

"The launch pad time for a Saturday attempt would be 2:17 p.m. EDT," Mike Sarafin, NASA's Artemis mission manager, said at a news conference on Tuesday. "It's a two-hour window." NASA officials added that if the rocket didn't take off on Saturday, another launch could be scheduled as soon as 48 hours later.

NASA views this flight as the first of three missions that will be a vital testbed for the hardware, software and ground systems that are intended to one day transport the first humans to Mars and beyond. The upcoming uncrewed Artemis 1 test flight — part of the Artemis program named after the twin sister of the ancient Greek god Apollo — will be followed by Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 in 2024 and 2025/2026 respectively. Artemis 2 will make the same journey as Artemis 1, but with a four-person human crew, and Artemis 3 will send the first woman and the first person of color to land on the moon's south pole.

Monday's launch was scheduled for 8:33 a.m. ET, but the attempt was plagued with problems from the beginning. Initial fueling attempts hit delays in the early hours of Monday morning when lightning, which had already struck the Artemis rocket pad two days before, threatened to zap the rocket again.

Then, not long after 3 a.m. ET, the launch team announced it was having problems filling the rocket with supercooled liquid hydrogen fuel. These problems are reminiscent of those the team reported having during April's wet dress rehearsal, where a faulty helium valve and a liquid hydrogen leak prevented the rocket from being prepared to the point of ignition, Live Science previously reported. Another snag for Monday’s failed launch came when engineers spotted a suspected crack in the rocket's thermal insulation, although it was later deemed to be superficial.

The issue that finally scuppered the launch arrived just after 6 a.m. ET, when the team declared that the liquid hydrogen fuel was only cooling three of the rocket's four engines to sufficient temperatures prior to ignition. The problematic engine, named engine three, appeared to be around 40 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) warmer than the temperature of minus 420 F (minus 250 C) needed for launch.

NASA will attempt to fix this issue for Saturday afternoon's launch by performing the engine chilling procedure half an hour earlier — a trick officials say was effective during a successful test conducted last year.

And the engine may not have trouble cooling at all; NASA scientists have suggested a faulty temperature sensor may have falsely reported the temperature inside the engine as being much higher, and much further from flight-ready, than it actually was.

"The way the sensor is behaving does not line up with the physics of the situation," John Honeycutt, NASA's program manager for the Artemis 1 mission, said at the news conference.

The faulty sensor cannot be easily replaced, and swapping it out would likely mean the rocket has to be rolled back to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building for a thorough investigation. As this would probably mean delaying the launch for several months, Honeycutt said that his team was looking into creating a workaround plan that would enable flight engineers to make an "informed decision" on whether the rocket could take off without taking readings from the sensor.

NASA is banking heavily on a successful mission for Artemis 1, which has come under scrutiny for a price-tag that has ballooned to eye-watering levels. The program, which began in 2017, has already cost more than $40 billion to develop and is projected to knock U.S. taxpayers back by $93 billion by the end of 2025, according to the office of NASA inspector general Paul Martin — the space agency's internal auditor.

"Given our estimate of a $4.1 billion per-launch cost of the SLS/Orion system for at least the first four Artemis missions, NASA must accelerate its efforts to identify ways to make its Artemis-related programs more affordable," Martin said at a March 1 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. "Otherwise, relying on such an expensive single-use, heavy-lift rocket system will, in our judgment, inhibit if not derail NASA's ability to sustain its long-term human exploration goals of the moon and Mars."

Despite these issues, NASA officials insist that the American public will find the cost of the rocket — which they say will kickstart a new era of space exploration — to be justified.

"This is a brand new rocket. It's not going to fly until it's ready," NASA administrator Bill Nelson told reporters on Monday following the scrubbed launch. "There are millions of components of this rocket and its systems, and needless to say, the complexity is daunting when you bring it all into the focus of a countdown."

Nelson added that his own space shuttle launch, held in 1986 while he was a member of Congress, had four scrubs before it eventually took off.

"Had we launched on any one of those scrubs, it wouldn't have been a good day," he said.

NASA will be eager to launch Artemis before Sep. 10, the peak date of this year's hurricane season. So far, no named hurricanes have formed this year, but signs of increasing storm activity in the Atlantic basin suggest the period of unusual calm could be about to end.

https://www.livescience.com/nasa-announces-second-artemis-launch-date

[Rick Plant]

The August 2022 jobs report has been released. 315,000 jobs were added.

That brings the total since President Biden took office to nearly 10 million jobs. That's the fastest job growth in our history.


Payrolls rose 315,000 in August as companies keep hiring

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 315,000 jobs in August, just below the Dow Jones estimate for 318,000.

Wages also rose, with average hourly earnings up 5.2% from a year ago.

The biggest sector gainers were professional and business services, health care and retail.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/02/august-2022-jobs-report-.html

[Rick Plant]

Webb telescope captures its first image of exoplanet



The James Webb space telescope has taken its first image of an exoplanet -- a planet outside our solar system -- as astronomers hail the device's performance since its launch last year.

Images from the most powerful space telescope ever built have thrilled observers in recent months as it orbits the Sun a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth.

Its latest pioneering pictures show the exoplanet, called HIP 65426 b, is a gas giant with no rocky surface and could not be habitable.

"This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally," said Sasha Hinkley, astronomy professor at the University of Exeter, who led the observation team.

Webb's infrared gaze and coronagraphs -- telescopic attachments that block out starlight -- enable it to take direct images of exoplanets.

"It was really impressive how well the Webb coronagraphs worked to suppress the light of the host star," Hinkley said in a NASA statement on Thursday.

The HIP 65426 b exoplanet is six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter and young -- about 15 to 20 million years old, compared to the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.

The telescope, which only released its first images in July, has already revealed dazzling new detail of the Phantom Galaxy and of the planet Jupiter.

The Hubble space telescope previously captured direct exoplanet images, but in far less detail.

"I think what's most exciting is that we've only just begun," said Aarynn Carter, of the University of California. "We may even discover previously unknown planets."

The $10-billion Webb telescope is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. It is expected to operate for approximately 20 years.

© Agence France-Presse

[Rick Plant]

Launch attempt of Artemis 1 scrubbed after leak detected; next try will come in October

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Jim Free and Artemis Mission Manager Mike Sarafin spoke Saturday around 4 p.m., addressing the scrub of Saturday's Artemis 1 launch.

"We do not launch until we think it's right," Nelson said. "Our teams have labored over that and that is the conclusion they came to...Safety is the top of the list."

Free said the launch will not come Monday or Tuesday, but will need to be later, likely late September or October. Late September is less likely because of conflicts with SpaceX Crew 5.

"We don't go into these tests lightly," Free said. "We were confident coming into today, but we're not going to launch until we're ready."

Sarafin stated the large hydrogen leak occurred when crews went from the "slow fill" to the "quick fill."

He said teams tried three times to resolve the leak, but were unsuccessful.

Sarafin said engineers discussed multiple options but none would have allowed for the launch to take place before the end of the launch period on Sept. 6.

Officials confirmed the rocket will need to be rolled back to VAB because batteries need to be changed.

https://www.wesh.com/article/artemis-launch-scrubbed/41071794