Saturday, August 07, 2021

TRULY THE GAY GAMES
First transgender athlete to medal at Olympics wins gold

There's a record number of openly LGBTQ athletes at the Tokyo Olympic Games.

By Siobhan Neela-Stock on August 6, 2021

Quinn is the first trans athlete to medal at the Olympics. Credit: OMar Vega / Getty Images

The first transgender athlete won Olympic gold on Thursday, marking a historic achievement, but one that's also bittersweet.

Quinn, along with the Canadian soccer team, played a long match against Sweden, with a tied result moving into a tense penalty shootout, which Canada won. More openly trans and non-binary athletes have competed in the Tokyo Olympic Games than ever before as intense debates over trans people in athletics have frustratingly swept through schools and statehouses in the U.S.

Quinn's the first openly trans athlete to participate in the Olympics after the International Olympic Committee changed its rules in 2004 to allow transgender athletes to compete in the Games. But they were followed by others competing in weightlifting and BMX racing later on in the Games.

Quinn's one of at least 181 openly queer athletes at the Tokyo Games, more than three times the number who participated in the Rio Games, according to Outsports.

Gold medallists Canada after the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games women's final football match. Credit: TIZIANA FABI / AFP Via Getty Images

Although Quinn's said they're proud to see their name on the soccer roster, they're also sad past Olympians like them couldn't be open about their identities, Quinn revealed on Instagram a day before the Tokyo Olympics began. "I feel proud seeing 'Quinn' up on the lineup and on my accreditation. I feel sad knowing there were Olympians before me unable to live their truth because of the world," they wrote.

Quinn competed in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, where they and their team won a bronze medal, but they weren't out yet.

In a September 2020 Instagram post, Quinn told the world they were trans. While they've been out with their loved ones for years, part of Quinn's motivation to come out online is to support queer people who may not see people like themselves on social media.

"Instagram is a weird space. I wanted to encapsulate the feelings I had towards my trans identity in one post but that’s really not why anyone is on here, including myself," Quinn wrote. "So instead I want to be visible to queer folks who don’t see people like them on their feed. I know it saved my life years ago."

Quinn's accomplishment comes as trans and nonbinary athletes, like Olympic weightlifter Laurel Hubbard and Olympic skateboarder Alana Smith, respectively, gain more mainstream recognition because of their presence in the Games.
SEE ALSO: 3 helpful tips for when you plan to come out online

Despite gains for trans athletes on the Olympic stage, conservatives in the U.S. continue to pass bills to stop trans teens from playing on sports teams that align with their gender.

"When trans kids have access to gender-affirming spaces at school, like a locker room, a restroom, a sports team, they are 25 percent less likely to commit suicide," Annie Lieberman, director of policy programs for Athlete Ally, an LGBTQ athletic advocacy nonprofit, told ABC News.

The hurdles transgender athletes face to play on the teams that make them feel the safest makes Quinn's gold medal in the Olympics all the more impactful.

What's it like to watch your goalkeeper partner play for Olympic gold?

Surprisingly calm, then exhilarating

CBC/Radio-Canada

© Terri Trembath/CBC Olympic track cyclist Georgia Simmerling, partner of Olympic soccer goalkeeper Stephanie Labbé, watched the women's soccer gold-medal game along with Canadian fans at a bar in Calgary early Friday morning.

Bleary-eyed fans across the country watched nervously as the Canadian women's soccer team took the field against Sweden in a closely contested Olympic gold-medal match early Friday morning, but Georgia Simmerling was remarkably calm.

"To be honest, I'm pretty chill about it," said Simmerling, whose partner, Stephanie Labbé, is the starting goalkeeper for Canada.

"I know her so well, so if she gets hit or knocked down, I'm just sending her good vibes. I know she'll get back up."

Simmerling, an Olympian herself who just got back from competing at the Tokyo Games in track cycling, has experience steeling herself and steadying her emotions before a big competition.

"I guess I know how to control my nerves," she said.

"I obviously enjoy it. I love it. I'm her biggest fan. But yeah, I stay pretty calm."

Surrounded by fans gathered early Friday at a Calgary bar — eager to see the Canadian soccer team take its first crack at an Olympic gold medal, after earning bronze in their past two efforts — Simmerling said she was confident in Labbé.

"Steph turns into a bit of beast when it comes to stepping onto that field," she said.

That proved to be prescient.

After giving up a first-half goal, the Canadian team came from behind to tie the game and then endured numerous, dangerous-looking Swedish attacks in extra time, but ultimately emerged victorious in a six-round penalty shootout.

Both teams put on an outstanding display of goalkeeping in the shootout, but Labbé was just that much better than her Swedish counterpart, preventing four of Sweden's six attempts.

In the sixth and decisive round, Labbé denied Jonna Andersson's attempt and then Julia Grosso delivered the dagger for Canada by a matter of centimetres.

The Swedish keeper guessed correctly where Grosso would shoot and got a hand on the ball — looking for a fraction of a second like she had saved it — but it deflected off her glove and up into the top of the netting.

There may have been no crowd at the stadium in Japan, but the fans at the Calgary bar erupted in cheers, hugs and high-fives.

© Terri Trembath/CBC Georgia Simmerling reacts with other fans at a bar in Calgary early Friday as the Canadian women's soccer team wins the Olympic gold medal in a six-round penalty shootout.

As the pandemonium calmed, Simmerling caught her breath and considered the magnitude of what Labbé and her teammates had just accomplished.

"These girls are meant to do this," she said.

"They know what they need to do and they came up big. That was unbelievable. It was so incredible to watch."

Out boxer Nesthy Petecio dedicates her Olympic boxing silver to LGBTQ community

Nesthy Petecio fell short in a close gold medal bout, but etched her name in Filipino Olympic history with her silver medal

By Brian C. Bell @WonderboyOTM

Aug 3, 2021

Nesthy Petecio Photo by Dan Mullan/Getty Images

Out Filipina boxer Nesthy Petecio secured the first silver medal in Olympic Women’s Featherweight Boxing Tuesday after losing in heartbreaking fashion to Japan’s Sena Irie via unanimous decision. Afer the match, Petecio dedicated her medal to the LGBTQ community.

But the fight itself was much closer than the story the judges’ scorecards tell. After Irie was awarded the first round, Petecio battled back with solid combinations in the second. In contrast, Irie worked a solid jab but also spent a good chunk of the gold medal bout tying up and clinching Petecio.

Petecio made up ground in the second round, setting up a winner-take-all third round that resembled more of the same: Petecio launching flurries when an opening showed itself and Irie working the jab in between throwing off Petecio’s rhythm with grapples.

All five judges scored the third round in Irie’s favor, giving the Tokyo resident the first Women’s Featherweight gold medal in Olympic history. Though Women’s Boxing has been included at the Olympics since 2012, the 2020 Games marked the first inclusion of the sport’s featherweight division.

Petecio’s silver medal also proved historic. Her incredible run at the Tokyo Games made her the first woman from the Philippines to win a boxing medal, and the first Filipino boxer to medal at the Olympics since 1996. She and fellow out teammate Irish Magno were also the first Filipino women ever to compete in boxing at the Olympic level.

And Petecio’s show of emotion during the medal ceremony proved that the moment wasn’t lost on her despite not returning home with the gold. Petecio openly wept as she raised her medal on the podium.

“I cried earlier because I wanted to dedicate the gold to coach Nolito [Velasco],” she told ESPN afterward. “We came up short but I did my best in the ring.”

She added that “this fight is also for the LGBTQ community.”

Petecio’s best brought immense pride to her home nation, and it is paying her back in kind. Per PhilStar News, Filipino real estate companies Suntrust Properties and Ovialand awarded Petecio a condo and house worth P10 million ($201,000) and P2.5 million ($50,000) respectively. She was also given a P17 million ($342,000) incentive.

The silver medalist’s rise from an impoverished childhood to Olympic success has been the prevailing narrative during her run in Tokyo. Now, after making history, she appears to be set for life financially.

But that doesn’t mean she is complacent. Petecio is already looking to the Paris Games in 2024, staking her claim for the Philippines’ first boxing gold medal.

We’re still chasing the gold,” she said. “We’re not done.”

Tokyo Olympics 2020: 'About time', LGBTQ athletes unleash rainbow wave at Games

A wave of rainbow-colored pride, openness and acceptance is sweeping through Olympic pools, skateparks, halls and fields, with a record number of openly gay competitors in Tokyo.

The Associated PressJuly 27, 2021 16:41:18 IST

“I hope that any young LGBT person out there can see that no matter how alone you feel right now you are not alone," Tom Daley said. AFP

When Olympic diver Tom Daley announced in 2013 that he was dating a man and “couldn't be happier,” his coming out was an act of courage that, with its rarity, also exposed how the top echelons of sport weren't seen as a safe space by the vast majority of LGBTQ athletes.

Back then, the number of gay Olympians who felt able and willing to speak openly about their private lives could be counted on a few hands. There'd been just two dozen openly gay Olympians among the more than 10,000 who competed at the 2012 London Games, a reflection of how unrepresentative and anachronistic top-tier sports were just a decade ago and, to a large extent, still are.

Still, at the Tokyo Games, the picture is changing.

A wave of rainbow-colored pride, openness and acceptance is sweeping through Olympic pools, skateparks, halls and fields, with a record number of openly gay competitors in Tokyo. Whereas LGBTQ invisibility used to make Olympic sports seem out of step with the times, Tokyo is shaping up as a watershed for the community and for the Games — now, finally, starting to better reflect human diversity.

“It's about time that everyone was able to be who they are and celebrated for it,” said US skateboarder Alexis Sablone, one of at least five openly LGBTQ athletes in that sport making their Olympic debut in Tokyo.

“It's really cool,” Sablone said. “What I hope that means is that even outside of sports, kids are raised not just under the assumption that they are heterosexual."

The gay website Outsports.com has been tallying the number of publicly out gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and nonbinary athletes in Tokyo. After several updates, its count is now up to 168, including some who petitioned to get on the list. That's three times the number that Outsports tallied at the last Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. At the London Games, it counted just 23.

“The massive increase in the number of out athletes reflects the growing acceptance of LGBTQ people in sports and society,” Outsports says.

Daley is also broadcasting that message from Tokyo, his fourth Olympics overall and second since he came out.

After winning gold for Britain with Matty Lee in 10-metre synchronised diving, the 27-year-old reflected on his journey from young misfit who felt “alone and different" to Olympic champion who says he now feels less pressure to perform because he knows that his husband and their son love him regardless.

“I hope that any young LGBT person out there can see that no matter how alone you feel right now you are not alone," Daley said. "You can achieve anything, and there is a whole lot of your chosen family out here."

“I feel incredibly proud to say that I am a gay man and also an Olympic champion,” he added. “Because, you know, when I was younger I thought I was never going to be anything or achieve anything because of who I was.”

Still, there's progress yet to be made.

Among the more than 11,000 athletes competing in Tokyo, there will be others who still feel held back, unable to come out and be themselves. Outsports’ list has few men, reflecting their lack of representation that extends beyond Olympic sports. Finnish Olympian Ari-Pekka Liukkonen is one of the rare openly gay men in his sport, swimming.

“Swimming, it’s still much harder to come out (for) some reason," he said. "If you need to hide what you are, it’s very hard.”

Only this June did an active player in the NFL — Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib — come out as gay. And only last week did a first player signed to an NHL contract likewise make that milestone announcement. Luke Prokop, a 19-year-old Canadian with the Nashville Predators, now has 189,000 likes for his “I am proud to publicly tell everyone that I am gay" post on Twitter.

The feeling that “there's still a lot of fight to be done” and that she needed to stand up and be counted in Tokyo is why Elissa Alarie, competing in rugby, contacted Outsports to get herself named on its list. With their permission, she also added three of her Canadian teammates.

“It’s important to be on that list because we are in 2021 and there are still, like, firsts happening. We see them in the men’s professional sports, NFL, and a bunch of other sports," Alarie said. "Yes, we have come a long way. But the fact that we still have firsts happening means that we need to still work on this.”

Tokyo's out Olympians are also almost exclusively from Europe, North and South America, and Australia/New Zealand. The only Asians on the Outsports list are Indian sprinter Dutee Chand and skateboarder Margielyn Didal from the Philippines.

That loud silence resonates with Alarie. Growing up in a small town in Quebec, she had no gay role models and "just thought something was wrong with me.”

"To this day, who we are is still illegal in many countries," she said. “So until it's safe for people in those countries to come out, I think we need to keep those voices loud and clear."

Updated Date:July 27, 2021 16:41:18 IST

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Scientists ID enzyme for making key industrial chemical in plants

by Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven Lab scientists identified an enzyme (PHBMT1) that transfers p-hydoxybenzoate (green) to lignin building blocks in poplar. The resulting conjugate is then incorporated into the nascent lignin polymer, leading to p-hydoxybenzoate-decorated lignin. The discovery may enable scientists to engineer plants to accumulate more of this important industrial chemical building block. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
Scientists studying the biochemistry of plant cell walls have identified an enzyme that could turn woody poplar trees into a source for producing a major industrial chemical. The research, just published in Nature Plants, could lead to a new sustainable pathway for making "p-hydroxybenzoic acid," a chemical building block currently derived from fossil fuels, in plant biomass.
"P-hydroxybenzoic acid is a versatile chemical feedstock. It can serve as a building block for making liquid crystals, a plasticizer of nylon resin, a sensitizer for thermal paper, and a raw material for making paraben, dyes, and pigments," said Chang-Jun Liu, a plant biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and lead author on the paper.
The global market value of p-hydroxybenzoic acid stood at U.S. $59 million in 2020 and is projected to reach $80 million by 2026. But the current process for making this important chemical relies on petrochemicals. Its synthesis requires harsh reaction conditions (high temperature and high pressure) and has negative environmental impacts. Finding an economical and sustainable way to make p-hydroxybenzoic acid in plants could help mitigate environmental impacts and contribute to an emerging bioeconomy.
"We've identified a key enzyme responsible for the synthesis and accumulation of p-hydroxybenzoate (pBA)—the conjugate base of p-hydroxybenzoic acid—in lignin, one of three major polymers that make up the structural support that surrounds plant cells," said Liu. "This discovery may enable us to engineer plants to accumulate more of this chemical building block in their cell walls, thereby potentially adding value to the biomass."
Biofuels and bioproducts
Cell walls are made of a combination of chainlike polymers—cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin—which are the major source of plant biomass. Liu and other scientists have been exploring the biochemical pathways that build up these plant polymers. One goal has been to understand how changing the mix of polymers could make it easier and more cost-effective to convert biomass into biofuels.
Lignin, which gives plants structural integrity, mechanical strength, and waterproofing, is particularly hard to break down. But recent research aimed at generating cellulosic ethanol has driven technical advances and opportunities to increase the uses and therefore the value of lignin.
Scientists have known that the building blocks that make up lignin often have various chemical groups, including pBA, attached as sidechains. The exact function of these side groups was unknown. But Liu's team was interested in exploring their influence on lignin structure and properties. So, they set out to discover the enzyme responsible for attaching pBA to lignin.
"If we could identify this enzyme, and then control the expression of the gene that makes this enzyme, we could effectively control the level of pBA in the biomass of bioenergy plants," Liu said.
Searching for the gene
The scientists conducted their study on poplar. This fast-growing tree species has rich woody biomass. It has emerged as a promising renewable feedstock for biofuel and bio-based chemical production. It also has pBA as the main sidechain "decoration" on its lignin.
To systematically identify and characterize the enzyme(s) involved in attaching pBA or other chemical groups to lignin, Liu's team screened a series of candidate genes identified through a related genomic study of poplar.
"We cloned 20 candidate genes that are primarily expressed in woody tissues and encode enzymes called acyltransferases. These are the enzymes most likely involved in transferring chemical groups to the particular accepter molecules," Liu said.
The scientists expressed the enzymes coded for by these genes and mixed each one with various building blocks including one isotope-labeled carbon compound. Tracing the isotope label and a range of other test-tube based biomolecular techniques allowed the scientists to monitor whether each candidate enzyme was involved in attaching sidechains such as pBA (or the other chemical groups). They were able to zero in on the most likely candidate for the reaction of interest.
Firmly proving the enzyme's function in plants, however, was a formidable task. It took the scientists many years—and required the emergence of new advances in molecular biology.
One of those was a technique known as CRISPR/Cas9, a modern "genetic scissor" that permits precise editing of genes in the genome of a target organism. The team used CRISPR/Cas9 to generate a poplar variant in which the candidate enzyme-encoding gene had been deleted. Subsequent analysis found almost no pBA on the lignin in stems of these plants.
They also tried another genetic test by over-expressing the gene that produces the candidate enzyme. Those plants accumulated increased levels of pBA.
"Together these data provide conclusive proof that the gene/enzyme we have identified can attach pBA to the lignin building blocks," Liu said.
Ramping up plants' pBA content through genetic manipulation could be one way to sustainably produce p-hydroxybenzoic acid.
The scientists also found that lignin from plants that were engineered to accumulate lower pBA were easier to dissolve in a solvent. This implies that, in nature, pBA helps to strengthen lignin.
Therefore, another potential outcome of identifying the enzyme for adding pBA to lignin could be genetic strategies for tailoring the chemical properties of lignin.
Lowering pBA might improve the "delignification" of woody biomass for processes such as pulping, paper making, and biofuel production.
Conversely, increasing pBA levels on lignin could potentially enhance timber durability while also providing a pathway for long-term carbon sequestration by locking up more carbon in plant biomass—another key DOE goal.
"This work is a good example of basic scientific research leading to potentially valuable downstream applications," said John Shanklin, Chair of the Brookhaven Lab Biology Department.New enzyme breaks down waste for less expensive biofuels, bioproducts
More information: Monolignol acyltransferase for lignin p-hydroxybenzoylation in Populus, Nature Plants (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41477-021-00975-1 , www.nature.com/articles/s41477-021-00975-1
Journal information: Nature Plants
Provided by Brookhaven National Laboratory

Reduce methane or face climate catastrophe, scientists warn

Exclusive: IPCC says gas, produced by farming, shale gas and oil extraction, playing ever-greater role in overheating planet

Animal farming is one of the activities producing methane, which has a warming

Cutting carbon dioxide is not enough to solve the climate crisis – the world must act swiftly on another powerful greenhouse gas, methane, to halt the rise in global temperatures, experts have warned.

Leading climate scientists will give their starkest warning yet – that we are rushing to the brink of climate catastrophe – in a landmark report on Monday. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will publish its sixth assessment report, a comprehensive review of the world’s knowledge of the climate crisis and how human actions are altering the planet. It will show in detail how close the world is to irreversible change.

One of the key action points for policymakers is likely to be a warning that methane is playing an ever greater role in overheating the planet. The carbon-rich gas, produced from animal farming, shale gas wells and poorly managed conventional oil and gas extraction, heats the world far more effectively than carbon dioxide – it has a “warming potential” more than 80 times that of CO2 – but has a shorter life in the atmosphere, persisting for about a decade before it degrades into CO2.

Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development and a lead reviewer for the IPCC, said methane reductions were probably the only way of staving off temperature rises of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which extreme weather will increase and “tipping points” could be reached. “Cutting methane is the biggest opportunity to slow warming between now and 2040,” he said. “We need to face this emergency.”

Zaelke said policymakers must heed the IPCC findings on methane before the UN climate talks, Cop26, in Glasgow in November. “We need to see at Cop26 a recognition of this problem, that we need to do something on this.”

Cutting methane could balance the impact of phasing out coal, a key goal at Cop26 because it is the dirtiest fossil fuel and has caused sharp rises in emissions in recent years. However, coal use has a perverse climate effect: the particles of sulphur it produces shield the Earth from some warming by deflecting some sunlight.

That means the immediate effect of cutting coal use could be to increase warming, although protecting the Earth in the medium and long term. Zaelke said cutting methane could offset that. “Defossilisation will not lead to cooling until about 2050. Sulphur falling out of the atmosphere will unmask warming that is already in the system,” he said.

“Climate change is like a marathon – we need to stay in the race. Cutting carbon dioxide will not lead to cooling in the next 10 years, and beyond that our ability to tackle climate change will be so severely compromised that we will not be able to run on. Cutting methane gives us time.”

Britain could be taking the lead in tackling the climate crisis. Where’s the ambition?

Keir Starmer

Levels of methane have risen sharply in recent years, caused by shale gas, poorly managed conventional gas, oil drilling and meat production. Last year, methane emissions rose by a record amount, according to the UN environment programme.

Satellite data shows that some of the key sources of methane are poorly managed Russian oil and gas wells. Gas can be extracted from conventional drilling using modern techniques that all but eliminate “fugitive” or accidental methane emissions. But while countries such as Qatar take care over methane, Russia, which is a party to the 2015 Paris climate agreement but has made little effort to cut its emissions, has some of the leakiest infrastructure

“Today more than 40% of EU gas is methane heavy gas from Russia, which is worse than coal for the climate,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser now with the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. “The EU should begin to measure and then regulate methane emissions from all its natural gas imports to begin a cleanup of global natural gas.”

Reducing methane emissions can save money. The UN’s assessment found that about half of the reductions in methane needed could be achieved with a quick payback.

Zaelke urged governments to consider crafting a new deal, alongside the Paris agreement, that would cover methane and require countries to sharply reduce their gas. “I predict we will have to have a global methane agreement,” he said.

Methane is also produced by melting permafrost, and there have been indications that the Siberian heatwave could increase emissions of the gas. However, large-scale emissions from permafrost melting are thought to be still some way off, while emissions of methane from agriculture and industry can be tackled today.

SCIENTISTS WARN OF METHANE “TIME BOMB” IN SIBERIA

"IT'S NOT GOOD NEWS IF IT'S RIGHT."

HÉLÉNA CHANSON / FUTURISM

Methane Bomb

For years, climate scientists have warned the world that rising temperatures in the Arctic risk detonating a methane “time bomb” of ancient greenhouse gas deposits that have been trapped away in the ice. Now, The Washington Post reports that the bomb’s timer is ticking dangerously low.

Satellite imagery of northern Siberia show that vast stretches of limestone that used to be trapped under permafrost are emerging and thawing out, according to research published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As the limestone warmed up during a Siberian heat wave last year, it started to crack and pockets of gas escaped — unleashing a huge amount of methane that had, up until now, been safely sequestered out of the atmosphere.

“It’s intriguing,” Woodwell Climate Research Center senior scientist Robert Max Holmes, who didn’t work on the study, told WaPo. “It’s not good news if it’s right.”

Reverse Engineering

The scientists, who hail from a variety of European and Russian research institutes, actually uncovered the thawing limestone in a roundabout way. Thanks to a mapping technology called PULSE, the scientists’ satellite scans revealed the alarming methane emissions first, Inverse reports, and they pieced together where they came from after the fact.

“We found that two elongated areas of elevated methane concentration on the PULSE map perfectly coincide with two stripes where limestone formations occur in the subsurface,” lead study author and University of Bonn geoscientist Nikolaus Froitzheim told Inverse.

Big Kaboom

Holmes, the researcher who didn’t actually work on the study, told WaPo that the research deserves further scrutiny before anyone slams the panic button. But, he added, there is the potential for climate change calamity if all the gas currently trapped in the world’s permafrost were released.

“What we do know with quite a lot of confidence is how much carbon is locked up in the permafrost,” he told WaPo. “It’s a big number and as the Earth warms and permafrost thaws, that ancient organic matter is available to microbes for microbial processes and that releases CO2 and methane. “If something in the Arctic is going to keep me up at night that’s still what it is.”

Space Station Incident Demands Independent Investigation

A space expert warns NASA's safety culture may be eroding again

JAMES OBERG
06 AUG 2021

Russia's "Nauka" Multipurpose Laboratory Module is pictured shortly after docking to the Zvezda service module's Earth-facing port on the International Space Station, with the Brazilian coast 263 miles below. In the foreground is the Soyuz MS-18 crew ship docked to the Rassvet module on 29 July 2021.
NASA

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.

In an International Space Station major milestone more than fifteen years in the making, a long-delayed Russian science laboratory named Nauka automatically docked to the station on 29 July, prompting sighs of relief in the Mission Control Centers in Houston and Moscow. But within a few hours, it became shockingly obvious the celebrations were premature, and the ISS was coming closer to disaster than at anytime in its nearly 25 years in orbit.

While the proximate cause of the incident is still being unravelled, there are worrisome signs that NASA may be repeating some of the lapses that lead to the loss of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles and their crews. And because political pressures seem to be driving much of the problem, only an independent investigation with serious political heft can reverse any erosion in safety culture.

Let's step back and look at what we know happened: In a cyber-logical process still not entirely clear, while passing northwest to southeast over Indonesia, the Nauka module's autopilot apparently decided it was supposed to fly away from the station. Although actually attached, and with the latches on the station side closed, the module began trying to line itself up in preparation to fire its main engines using an attitude adjustment thruster. As the thruster fired, the entire station was slowly dragged askew as well.

Since the ISS was well beyond the coverage of Russian ground stations, and since the world-wide Soviet-era fleet of tracking ships and world-circling network of "Luch" relay comsats had long since been scrapped, and replacements were slow in coming, nobody even knew Nauka was firing its thruster, until a slight but growing shift in the ISS's orientation was finally detected by NASA.

Nauka approaches the space station, preparing to dock on 29 July 2021. NASA

Within minutes, the Flight Director in Houston declared a "spacecraft emergency"—the first in the station's lifetime—and his team tried to figure out what could be done to avoid the ISS spinning up so fast that structural damage could result. The football-field-sized array of pressurized modules, support girders, solar arrays, radiator panels, robotic arms, and other mechanisms was designed to operate in a weightless environment. But it was also built to handle stresses both from directional thrusting (used to boost the altitude periodically) and rotational torques (usually to maintain a horizon-level orientation, or to turn to a specific different orientation to facilitate arrival or departure of visiting vehicles). The juncture latches that held the ISS's module together had been sized to accommodate these forces with a comfortable safety margin, but a maneuver of this scale had never been expected.

Meanwhile, the station's automated attitude control system had also noted the deviation and began firing other thrusters to countermand it. These too were on the Russian half of the station. The only US orientation-control system is a set of spinning flywheels that gently turn the structure without the need for thruster propellant, but which would have been unable to cope with the unrelenting push of Nauka's thruster. Later mass-media scenarios depicted teams of specialists manually directing on-board systems into action, but the exact actions taken in response still remain unclear—and probably were mostly if not entirely automatic. The drama continued as the station crossed the Pacific, then South America and the mid-Atlantic, finally entering Russian radio contact over central Europe an hour after the crisis had begun. By then the thrusting had stopped, probably when the guilty thruster exhausted its fuel supply. The sane half of the Russian segment then restored the desired station orientation.

Initial private attempts to use telemetry data to visually represent the station's tumble that were posted online looked bizarre, with enormous rapid gyrations in different directions. Mercifully, the truth of the situation is that the ISS went through a simple long-axis spin of one and a half full turns, and then a half turn back to the starting alignment. The jumps and zig-zags were computational artifacts of the representational schemes used by NASA, which relate to the concept of "gimbal lock" in gyroscopes.

How close the station had come to disaster is an open question, and the flight director humorously alluded to it in a later tweet that he'd never been so happy as when he saw on external TV cameras that the solar arrays and radiators were still standing straight in place. And any excessive bending stress along docking interfaces between the Russian and American segments would have demanded quick leak checks. But even if the rotation was "simple," the undeniably dramatic event has both short term and long-term significance for the future of the space station. And it has antecedents dating back to the very birth of the ISS in 1997.

How close the ISS had come to disaster is still an open question.

At this point, unfortunately, is when the human misjudgments began to surface. To calm things down, official NASA spokesmen provided very preliminary underestimates in how big and how fast the station's spin had been. These were presented without any caveat that the numbers were unverified—and the real figures turned out to be much worse. The Russian side, for its part, dismissed the attitude deviation as a routine bump in a normal process of automatic docking and proclaimed there would be no formal incident investigation, especially any that would involve their American partners. Indeed, both sides seemed to agree that the sooner the incident was forgotten, the better. As of now, the US side is deep into analysis of induced stresses on critical ISS structures, with the most important ones, such as the solar arrays, first. Another standard procedure after this kind of event is to assess potential indicators of stress-induced damage, especially in terms of air leaks, and where best to monitor cabin pressure and other parameters to detect any such leaks.

The bureaucratic instinct to minimize the described potential severity of the event needs cold-blooded assessment. Sadly, from past experience, this mindset of complacency and hoping for the best is the result of natural human mental drift that comes when there are long periods of apparent normalcy. Even if there is a slowly emerging problem, as long as everything looks okay in the day to day, the tendency is ignore warning signals as minor perturbations. The safety of the system is assumed rather than verified—and consequently managers are led into missing clues, or making careless choices, that lead to disaster. So these recent indications of this mental attitude about the station's attitude are worrisome. The NASA team has experienced that same slow cultural rot of assuming safety several times over the past decades, with hideous consequences. Team members in the year leading up to the 1986 Challenger disaster (and I was deep within the Mission Control operations then) had noticed and begun voicing concerns over growing carelessness and even humorous reactions to occasional "stupid mistakes," without effect. Then, after imprudent management decisions, seven people died.

The same drift was noticed in the late 1990s, especially in the joint US/Russian operations on Mir and on early ISS flights. It led to the forced departure of a number of top NASA officials, who had objected to the trend that was being imposed by the White House's post-Cold War diplomatic goals, implemented by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin. Safety took a decidedly secondary priority to international diplomatic value. Legendary Mission Control leader Gene Kranz described the decisions that were made in the mid-1990s over his own objections, objections that led to his sudden departure from NASA. "Russia was subsequently assigned partnership responsibilities for critical in-line tasks with minimal concern for the political and technical difficulties as well as the cost and schedule risks," he wrote in 1999. "This was the first time in the history of US manned space flight that NASA assigned critical path, in-line tasks with little or no backup." By 2001-'02, the results were as Kranz and his colleagues had warned. "Today's problems with the space station are the product of a program driven by an overriding political objective and developed by an ad hoc committee, which bypassed NASA's proven management and engineering teams," he concluded.

To reverse the apparent new cultural drift, NASA headquarters or some even higher office is going to have to intervene.

By then the warped NASA management culture that soon enabled the Columbia disaster in 2003 was fully in place. Some of the wording in current management proclamations regarding the Nauka docking have an eerie ring of familiarity. "Space cooperation continues to be a hallmark of U.S.-Russian relations and I have no doubt that our joint work reinforces the ties that have bound our collaborative efforts over the many years" wrote NASA Director Bill Nelson to Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency, on July 31. There was no mention of the ISS's first declared spacecraft emergency, nor any dissatisfaction with Russian contribution to it.

To reverse the apparent new cultural drift, and thus potentially forestall the same kind of dismal results as before, NASA headquarters or some even higher office is going to have to intervene. The causes of the Nauka-induced "space sumo match" of massive cross-pushing bodies need to be determined and verified. And somebody needs to expose the decision process that allowed NASA to approve the ISS docking of a powerful thruster-equipped module without the on-site real-time capability to quickly disarm that system in an emergency. Because the apparent sloppiness of NASA's safety oversight on visiting vehicles looks to be directly associated with maintaining good relations with Moscow, the driving factor seems to be White House diplomatic goals—and that's the level where a corrective impetus must originate. With a long-time U.S. Senate colleague, Nelson, recently named head of NASA, President Biden is well connected to issue such guidance for a thorough investigation by an independent commission, followed by implementation of needed reforms. The buck stops with him.

As far as Nauka's role in this process of safety-culture repair, it turns out that quite by bizarre coincidence, a similar pattern was played out by the very first Russian launch that inaugurated the ISS program, the 'Zarya' module [called the 'FGB'] in late 1997. Nauka turns out to be the repeatedly rebuilt and upgraded backup module for that very launch, and the parallels are remarkable. The day the FGB was launched, on 23 November 1997, the mission faced disaster when it refused to accept ground commands to raise its original atmosphere-skimming parking orbit. As it crossed over Russian ground sites, controllers in Moscow sent commands, and the spacecraft didn't answer. Meanwhile, NASA guests at a nearby facility were celebrating with Russian colleagues as nobody told them of the crisis. Finally, on the last available in-range pass, controllers tried a new command format that the onboard computer did recognize and acknowledge. The mission—and the entire ISS project—was saved, and the American side never knew. Only years later did the story appear in Russian newspapers.

Still, for all its messy difficulties and frustrating disappointments, the U.S./Russian partnership turned out to be a remarkably robust "mutual co-dependence" arrangement, when managed with "tough love." Neither side really had practical alternatives if it wanted a permanent human presence in space, and they still don't—so both teams were devoted to making it work. And it could still work—if NASA keeps faith with its traditional safety culture and with the lives of those astronauts who died in the past because NASA had failed them.

Postscript: As this story was going to press, a NASA spokesperson responded to queries about the incident saying:

As shared by NASA's Kathy Lueders and Joel Montalbano in the media telecon following the event, Roscosmos regularly updated NASA and the rest of the international partners on MLM's progress during the approach to station. We continue to have confidence in our partnership with Roscosmos to operate the International Space Station. When the unexpected thruster firings occurred, flight control teams were able to enact contingency procedures and return the station to normal operations within an hour. We would point you to Roscosmos for any specifics on Russian systems/performance/procedures.

James Oberg is a retired "rocket scientist" in Texas, after a 20+ year career in NASA Mission Control and subsequently an on-air space consultant for ABC News and then NBC News. The author of a dozen books and hundreds of magazine articles on the past, present, and potential future of space exploration, he has reported from space launch and operations centers across the United States and Russia and North Korea. His home page is www.jamesoberg.com.

How the space station flipped out of control—and why that's a big problem
An unusual day aboard the ISS.

By Mark Kaufman on August 6, 2021

The International Space Station orbiting above Earth. Credit: Nasa

The International Space Station flipped over on its back on July 29.

This was a significant, though fortunately not disastrous, nearly one-hour episode for humanity's largest and oldest space outpost. The station slowly turned over one and a half times. (Or as NASA describes it, the space station experienced a "total attitude change" of around 540 degrees, with "attitude" being jargon for a spacecraft's orientation.) The new Russian module "Nauka" had docked to the sizeable 356-foot-long station, but Nauka's thrusters fired when they shouldn't have, causing the space station to start unexpectedly spinning.

"It was quite an event," said Keith Crisman, an assistant professor of space studies at the University of North Dakota who researches safety systems for human spaceflight. "It was a potentially serious issue," Crisman added, noting that an out-of-control spacecraft is one of the highest-risk events in space.

Later on July 29, after flight engineers had righted the space station, NASA held a media briefing to address the unusual event. The agency's summary: All is OK, the space station had returned to normal, and nobody aboard was in danger. In fact, a NASA public affairs officer said in an email that the station's spin was "slow enough to go unnoticed by the crew members on board" (until they received warning messages), and everything else operated normally.

While it's fortunate the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard are OK, the event still carries questions about what happened, along with future concerns about space station safety. "When spacecraft misfire it's a serious thing."

"When spacecraft misfire it's a serious thing," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks rocket and spacecraft launches. "I cannot imagine there aren't some very serious conversations going on at NASA."

What went wrong

As noted above, thrusters on Nauka started firing after the module docked to the space station, forcing the station to (slowly) spin at a maximum of half a degree per second. It ended up upside down, before the correction. On spacecraft, these types of misfires do sometimes happen, and more easily than engineers would like, explained Kurt Anderson, a professor of mechanical aerospace engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In 2016, for example, a thruster on Japan's 46-foot long astronomy satellite Hitomi misfired. Hitomi spun uncontrollably and broke apart. And perhaps most famously, the small spacecraft Gemini VIII (piloted by legendary astronaut Neil Armstrong in 1966) violently spun out of control after a thruster problem, but Armstrong impressively stopped the wild tumble, and narrowly avoided national tragedy.

(The space station, fortunately, is a big, over 925,000-pound object with lots of material to turn, so Nauka's thrusters didn't have a chance to get the station spinning treacherously.)

Life on the space station in 2020. Credit: NASA

But what triggered Nauka's mishap? A software glitch likely played a role. Nauka experienced some minor software issues before arriving at the space station, noted Crisman. The day after the unexpected flip, the Russian space agency Roscosmos officially blamed the event on a software glitch, causing thrusters to fire out and try to withdraw Nauka, which had just docked several hours before. That's as much as we currently know, which comes from a four-paragraph Roscosmos press release.

After the thrusters began misfiring, the space station soon entered an official "Loss of Attitude Control," the NASA representative told Mashable. The blasting thrusters were countered by other space station thrusters firing in the opposite direction to regain the station's normal orientation, NASA said. The station had to flip completely over — by 180 degrees — to right itself.

Real concerns

The space station excitement comes with some notable concerns, according to experts outside of NASA.

1. The space station is old and not meant for acrobatics. People first inhabited the station over two decades ago. "The ISS is an older piece of equipment. We call it legacy equipment," said Crisman.

It's not a spry vehicle intended to flip around, though the flipping in this case wasn't nearly violent. However, the station experienced thrusters fighting with each other for control of the craft, noted McDowell, which is undoubtedly somewhat strenuous for a spacecraft with attached instruments, like huge solar arrays branching out from the station. "You've got torque on relatively old parts," explained Crisman.

2. Wasted precious fuel: Stopping the station's flip required firing propellant from thrusters, which is problematic because propellant in space is finite, and at times necessary in order to maneuver the space station. There's no other way to purposefully move. "Propellant is blood."

"Propellant is blood," said Anderson. Unlike for most spacecraft, however, NASA can launch more propellant to the space station, though at a cost.

3. The misfiring thrusters couldn't immediately be turned off. To stop the station from spinning, ground control operators in Russia needed to tell the automated Nauka to stop firing. But this didn't work, necessitating the counter-thrusting. "That they couldn't get the thrusters shut off immediately bothers me," said the aerospace engineer Anderson.

4. Things could have been worse — much, much worse.

Any mishap on the space station has the benefit of happening under the watchful eye of NASA's space station team in Houston. "They have a really excellent flight control team," said McDowell, of the Center for Astrophysics.

NASA's flight controllers, like flight director Zebulon Scoville, immediately noticed the station's unexpected behavior, and soon declared a "spacecraft emergency."

Yet there shouldn't have ever been an emergency, emphasized Crisman. Yes, errors are inevitable, but the system shouldn't allow such an issue to percolate down into a potentially serious, active problem. "We should have systems in place to mitigate those errors," he said.

Broadly, these systems should follow the "Swiss Cheese Model," Crisman explained. Different layers of naturally imperfect departments (or layers of Swiss cheese) like mission control, computer programmers, engineers building spacecraft, etc. should make it extremely difficult for an error to find its way through the small holes in each department's slice of Swiss. In the case of the space station flipping, an error slipped through many, many layers of international Swiss cheese. "Humans are perfectly fallible, and machines are perfectly fallible."

Generally, the space station is a quiet place, tranquilly orbiting some 250 miles above Earth. It's an afterthought to many of us. But things can go wrong. It's hugely fortunate, for example, that Nauka didn't start misfiring as it was docking, potentially leading to an impact with the space station.

This recent flip wasn't terrible, but it's a poignant warning of our vulnerabilities in the harsh realm of space, even on the dependable space station.

"Space is dangerous," said Crisman. "Humans are perfectly fallible, and machines are perfectly fallible."

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