AFP

NASA scrubbed a test flight on Monday of its largest-ever rocket in a setback to the ambitious program to send humans back to the Moon — and eventually to Mars.

“We don’t launch until it’s right,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said after an engine issue forced a cancellation of the launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“This is a very complicated machine,” Nelson said. “You don’t want to light the candle until it’s ready to go.”

The goal of the flight is to test the 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew capsule that sits on top. The mission is uncrewed — mannequins equipped with sensors are standing in for astronauts.

Mike Sarafin, mission manager of the Artemis 1 program, said the US space agency may make another attempt on Friday.

“Friday is definitely in play,” Sarafin told reporters. “They’re still holding in the launch countdown configuration and we’re preserving the option for Friday.”

Next Monday is also an alternative launch date.

Blastoff had been planned for 8:33 am (1233 GMT) but was cancelled because of a temperature problem with one of the rocket’s four RS-25 engines.

NASA said a test to get one of the main engines to the proper temperature range for blastoff was not successful.

Delays are “part of the space business,” Nelson said, expressing confidence that NASA engineers will “get it fixed and then we’ll fly.”

Tens of thousands of people — including US Vice President Kamala Harris — had gathered to watch the launch, which comes 50 years after Apollo 17 astronauts last set foot on the Moon.

“While we hoped to see the launch of Artemis 1 today, the attempt provided valuable data as we test the most powerful rocket in history,” Harris tweeted. 

“Our commitment to the Artemis Program remains firm, and we will return to the Moon.”

Veteran NASA astronaut Stan Love told reporters he was disappointed but “not really surprised.”

“This is a brand new vehicle,” Love said. “It has a million parts. All of them have to work perfectly.”

– Extreme temperatures –

Overnight operations to fill the orange-and-white rocket with more than three million liters of ultra-cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen were briefly delayed by a high risk of lightning.

Around 3:00 am, a potential leak was detected during the filling of the main stage with hydrogen, causing a pause. After tests, the flow resumed.

NASA engineers later detected the engine temperature problem and put a hold on the countdown before scrubbing the launch altogether.

The Orion capsule is to orbit the Moon to see if the vessel is safe for people in the near future. At some point, Artemis aims to put a woman and a person of color on the Moon for the first time.

During the 42-day trip, Orion will follow an elliptical course around the Moon, coming within 60 miles (100 kilometers) at its closest approach and 40,000 miles at its farthest — the deepest into space by a craft designed to carry humans.

One of the mission’s primary objectives is to test the capsule’s heat shield, which at 16 feet in diameter is the largest ever built.

On its return to Earth’s atmosphere, the heat shield will have to withstand speeds of 25,000 miles per hour and a temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius) — roughly half as hot as the Sun.

– Crewed mission to Mars –

The dummies aboard the spacecraft will record acceleration, vibration and radiation levels.

The craft will also deploy small satellites to study the lunar surface.

NASA is expected to spend $93 billion between 2012 and 2025 on the Artemis program, which is already years behind schedule, at a cost of $4.1 billion per launch.

The next mission, Artemis 2, will take astronauts into orbit around the Moon without landing on its surface.

The crew of Artemis 3 is to land on the Moon in 2025 at the earliest.

And since humans have already visited the Moon, Artemis has its sights set on another lofty goal: a crewed mission to Mars.

The Artemis program aims to establish a lasting human presence on the Moon with an orbiting space station known as Gateway and a base on the surface.

Gateway would serve as a staging and refueling station for a voyage to the Red Planet that would take a minimum of several months.

Tens of millions of people across Pakistan were Monday battling the worst monsoon floods in a decade, with countless homes washed away, vital farmland destroyed and the country’s main river threatening to burst its banks.

Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman said a third of the nation was under water, creating a “crisis of unimaginable proportions”.

Officials say 1,136 people have died since June, when the seasonal rains began, but the final toll could be higher as hundreds of villages in the mountainous north have been cut off after flood-swollen rivers washed away roads and bridges.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but it can also bring destruction.

This year’s flooding has affected more than 33 million people — one in seven Pakistanis — said the National Disaster Management Authority.

“It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out,” Rehman told AFP, adding the economic cost would be devastating.

This year’s floods are comparable to those of 2010, the worst on record, when more than 2,000 people died.

Flood victims have taken refuge in makeshift camps that have sprung up across the country, where desperation is setting in.

“Living here is miserable. Our self-respect is at stake,” said Fazal e Malik, sheltering in the grounds of a school now home to around 2,500 people in the town of Nowshera in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“I stink but there is no place to take a shower. There are no fans.”

Near Sukkur, a city in southern Sindh province and home to an ageing colonial-era barrage on the Indus River that is vital to preventing further catastrophe, one farmer lamented the devastation wrought on his rice fields.

Millions of acres of rich farmland have been flooded by weeks of non-stop rain, but now the Indus is threatening to burst its banks as torrents of water course downstream from tributaries in the north.

“Our crop spanned over 5,000 acres on which the best quality rice was sown and is eaten by you and us,” Khalil Ahmed, 70, told AFP.

“All that is finished.”

– Landscape of water –

Much of Sindh is now an endless landscape of water, hampering a massive military-led relief operation.

“There are no landing strips or approaches available… our pilots find it difficult to land,” one senior officer told AFP.

The army’s helicopters were also struggling to pluck people to safety in the north, where soaring mountains and deep valleys make for treacherous flying conditions.

Many rivers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — which boasts some of Pakistan’s best tourist spots — have overflowed, demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room hotel that crumbled into a raging torrent.

The government has declared an emergency and appealed for international help, and on Sunday the first aid flights began arriving — from Turkey and the UAE.

It could not have come at a worse time for Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall.

In Washington later Monday, the International Monetary Fund executive board approved the revival of a $6 billion loan programme essential for the country to service its foreign debt.

“We should now be getting the 7th & 8th tranche of $1.17 billion,” Finance Minister Miftah Ismail said on Twitter.

But it is already clear it will take more to repair and rebuild after this monsoon.

Prices of basic goods — particularly onions, tomatoes and chickpeas — are soaring as vendors bemoan a lack of supplies from the flooded breadbasket provinces of Sindh and Punjab.

The meteorological office said the country as a whole had been deluged with twice the usual monsoon rainfall, but Balochistan and Sindh had seen more than four times the average of the last three decades.

Padidan, a small town in Sindh, was drenched by more than 1.2 metres (47 inches) of rain since June, making it the wettest place in Pakistan.

– More arriving daily –

Across Sindh, thousands of displaced people are camped alongside elevated highways and railway tracks — often the only dry spots as far as the eye can see.

More are arriving daily at Sukkur’s city ring road, belongings piled on boats and tractor trollies, looking for shelter until the floodwaters recede.

Sukkur Barrage supervisor Aziz Soomro told AFP the main headway of water was expected to arrive around September 5, but he was confident the 90-year-old sluice gates would cope.

The barrage diverts water from the Indus into 10,000 kilometers (6,210 miles) of canals that make up one of the world’s biggest irrigation schemes, but the farms it supplies are now mostly under water.

The only bright spark was the latest weather report, with the met office saying there was little chance of rain for the rest of the week.

In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, which lies close to Europe’s largest nuclear plant, which has been targeted by shelling, Ukrainians are picking up iodine pills and preparing for the worst.

The city lies some 50 kilometres (30 miles) as the crow flies from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant which has been occupied by Russian troops since early March in an area hit by ongoing fighting.

Moscow and Kyiv have traded blame over the shelling around the complex and the nearby town of Energodar amid UN warnings about “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

“You know, we survived the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” says Kateryna, a 68-year-old pensioner who still has thyroid problems linked to the 1986 disaster when one of the reactors exploded.

“That threat was very big, but we survived. Now we have six reactors, not one,” she said of the Zaporizhzhia complex. 

Like dozens of other residents, she went on Monday to a school handing out iodine tablets that can reduce the medical risk of radiation in the event of a disaster. 

Should a serious incident happen at a nuclear facility, it would release radioactive iodine into the atmosphere which, if inhaled, can increase the risk of thyroid cancer — an effect observed after Chernobyl. 

The tablets can help prevent radioactive iodine concentrating in the thyroid gland so it can be flushed out of the body naturally though the urine.

Some 13 schools have been distributing the tablets, which doctors say should be given to anyone living with in a 50-kilometre radius of the plant. 

So far, more than 5,000 of the city’s residents, among them more than 1,500 children, have collected iodine pills over a two-day period, officials say.

“The tablet is taken in case of danger, when the alarm is raised,” said Elena Karpenko, a nurse at the Zaporizhzhia Children’s Hospital.

– Radioactive risk –

With tensions high around the plant, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog are due to visit in the coming days, with the team led by IAEA chief Rafael Grossi. 

Beyond the shelling, Kyiv has also accused Moscow of using the plant for storing heavy weaponry and arms and stationing some 500 soldiers at the site. 

But the Kremlin has insisted it only has security personnel there. On Monday, Moscow urged the international community to put pressure on Ukraine “so it stops endangering the European continent by shelling”.

Last week, the plant was briefly severed from the national grid for the first time in its four-decade history after its last working power line was shelled. Ukraine’s nuclear agency Energoatom warned there was a risk of “hydrogen leakage and sputtering of radioactive substances”.

Over the weekend, the emergency services in Zaporizhzhia held training sessions on managing the risk of nuclear accidents. They carried out mock evacuations and conducted decontamination exercises involving radioactive dust. 

So far, the city has stockpiled two tonnes of decontamination products. 

In the event of a leak, two sirens will go off to warn the city’s inhabitants: an initial alarm then a second one 24 hours later. 

“Perhaps the radioactive cloud will not reach the place where people are,” said Taras Tyshchenko, the region’s health chief.

“By the time the second alarm goes off, we will clearly know how far the radioactive cloud has spread. 

“We will have all the information about safe areas to evacuation sites,” he said. 

Even without any future global warming, Greenland’s melting ice sheet will cause major sea level rise with potentially “ominous” implications over this century as temperatures continue to rise, according to a study published Monday.

Rising sea levels — pushed up mainly by melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica — are set to redraw the map over centuries and could eventually swamp land currently home to hundreds of millions of people, depending on humanity’s efforts to halt warming. 

The Greenland ice sheet is currently the main factor in swelling the Earth’s oceans, according to NASA, with the Arctic region heating at a faster rate than the rest of the planet. 

In the new study, published in Nature Climate Change, glaciologists found that regardless of any future fossil fuel pollution, warming to date will cause the Greenland ice sheet to shed 3.3 percent of its volume, committing 27.4 centimetres to sea level rise. 

While the researchers were not able to give an exact timeframe, they said most of it could happen by 2100 — meaning that current modelled projections of sea level rise could be understating the risks this century. 

The “shocking” results are also a lowest estimate because they do not take future warming into account, said lead author Jason Box, of the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. 

“It’s a conservative lower bound. The climate has only to continue warming around Greenland for more commitment,” he told AFP. 

If the high levels of melting seen in 2012 became an annual occurrence, the study estimated sea-level rise could be around 78 cm, enough to swamp vast swathes of low-lying coastlines and supercharge floods and storm surges. 

This should serve “as an ominous prognosis for Greenland’s trajectory through a 21st century of warming”, the authors said. 

In a landmark report on climate science last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the Greenland ice sheet would contribute an estimated maximum of 18cm to sea level rise by 2100 under the highest emissions scenario. 

Box, who was an author on that report, said his team’s latest research suggests those estimates are “too low”. 

Instead of using computer models, Box and colleagues used two decades of measurements and observational data to predict how the Greenland ice sheet will adjust to the warming already experienced. 

Upper areas of the ice sheet adds mass through snowfall every year, but since the 1980s the territory has been running an ice “budget deficit”, which sees it lose more ice than it gains through surface melting and other processes.

– ‘Radical’ method –

The theory that researchers used was initially developed to explain changes in Alpine glaciers, said Box. 

This holds that if more snow piles up on top of a glacier, it causes lower areas to expand. In this case the reduced snow is driving shrinking in lower parts of the glacier as it rebalances, he said. 

Box said the methods his team used were “radically different” from computer modelling, but could complement this work to predict the impacts of sea level rise in the coming decades. 

He said while climate change was raising more immediate threats like food security, the accelerating pace of sea level rise will become a challenge. 

“It’s kind of decades in the future when it will just force its way onto the agenda because it will begin displacing people more and more and more,” he said.

The world has warmed an average of nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, unleashing a catalogue of impacts from heatwaves to more intense storms.  

Under the Paris climate deal, countries have agreed to limit warming to 2C. 

But in their report on climate impacts this year, the IPCC said even if warming is stabilised at 2C to 2.5C, “coastlines will continue to reshape over millennia, affecting at least 25 megacities and drowning low-lying areas”, which were home to up to 1.3 billion people in 2010. 

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said on Monday he was en route to inspect Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, as Kyiv’s forces launched a counteroffensive to retake the occupied southern region of Kherson.

The coastal region of Kherson and its capital city of the same name have been contested by Russian troops since the war broke out six months ago.

“Today there was a powerful artillery attack on enemy positions in… the occupied Kherson region,” local government official Sergey Khlan told Ukraine’s Pryamyi TV channel.

“This is what we have been waiting for since the spring — it is the beginning of the de-occupation of Kherson region.”

Kherson city lies some 200 kilometres (125 miles) southwest of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — Europe’s largest atomic facility — which has also been occupied by Russian troops since early March. 

The plant was targeted over the weekend by fresh shelling, its operator said, with Moscow and Kyiv trading blame for attacks around the complex of six nuclear reactors in Energodar, a town on the banks of the Dnipro River.

Ukraine’s nuclear agency Energoatom has warned of the risk of a radiation leak.

Russian troops “continued to fire at Energodar and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant” on Sunday, injuring 10, among them four plant workers, it said in an update early on Monday.

As of 10:00 am (0700 GMT), the plant was operating “with the risk of violating radiation and fire safety standards”. 

But Russia’s defence ministry accused Ukrainian troops of shelling near the plant on Sunday, claiming it had shot down a “Ukrainian strike drone” approaching a nuclear fuel and radioactive waste storage area. 

And Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged the international community “to put pressure on the Ukrainian side so it stops endangering the European continent by shelling”.

Peskov said Russia saw the IAEA visit as “necessary” and had been “waiting for this mission for a long time”, insisting it would ensure its safety in the face of “constant” risks. 

– ‘Radiation blackmail’ –

Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky on Monday called for sanctions against Russia’s state nuclear energy agency Rosatom over the occupation of the plant.

“It’s not normal that there are no sanctions against Rosatom for its radiation blackmail at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant,” he said.

“The Russians are the only terrorists in the world that have managed to turn a nuclear plant into a battlefield.”

The UN’s nuclear watchdog has for months been asking to visit the site, warning of “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

Writing on Twitter, Grossi on Monday said an IAEA support and assistance mission was “now on its way” with the team due to arrive “later this week”. 

The United Nations has called for an end to all military activity in the area surrounding the complex.

Ukraine initially feared an IAEA visit would legitimise the Russian occupation of the site before finally supporting the idea of a mission.

In its Monday update, Energoatom said the Russians had “increased pressure on the personnel of the plant to prevent them from disclosing (to the IAEA) evidence of the occupiers’ crimes at the plant and its use as a military base”.

The G7 industrial powers on Monday demanded free access for the IAEA team to “engage directly, and without interference, with the Ukrainian personnel responsible for operating these facilities”. 

And in Stockholm, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the team’s mission was “the hardest in the history of the IAEA, given the active combat activities undertaken by the Russian federation on the ground.”

Ukraine was the site of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe in 1986, when a reactor at the northern Chernobyl plant exploded and spewed radiation into the atmosphere.

Experts say any leak at Zaporizhzhia would more likely be on the scale of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Energoatom on Monday warned any leak would scatter radiation over swathes of southern Ukraine and southwestern regions of Russia. 

– Handing out iodine pills –

On the ground, at least two people were killed when Russian shells ploughed into the centre of the southern city of Mykolaiv, mayor Oleksandr Senkevych wrote on Telegram.

“For now, we know about two dead and five wounded,” he wrote, saying residential buildings had been hit.

With tensions high around the plant, Ukraine’s rescue services have been holding training sessions on managing the risk of nuclear accidents. 

Schools in Zaporizhzhia city began distributing iodine pills to reduce medical risk of radiation in the event of a disaster, with some 200 people turning up to collect them on Friday when distribution began, an AFP correspondent said.

“The tablet is taken in case of danger, when the alarm is raised,” said Elena Karpenko, a nurse at the Zaporizhzhia Children’s Hospital. 

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Pacing up and down a beach of fine white sand on the Black Sea coast, 63 year-old Ukrainian scientist Ivan Rusev breathes a sigh of relief: he did not find any dead dolphins today.

A few moments earlier he had rushed towards what he thought was a stranded dolphin. Mercifully it turned out only to be “tangled fishing gear”.

Rusev spoke to AFP from the Tuzly Estuaries National Nature Park, a protected area of 280 square kilometres (108 square miles) in the Bessarabia region of south-west Ukraine.

Rusev, whose weather-beaten face is shaded by a hat he brought during adventures in central Asia, is the scientific director of the park.

Now his job entails walking every morning along beaches bordered by anti-tank mines in search of the dolphins that have been washing up here since the beginning of the war.

“We only found three dolphins over our entire 44 kilometres (27 miles) coastline last year,” he tells AFP.

“This year, over the five kilometres (3 miles) that we can still access, we already found 35 of them.”

Much of the coastline has been off-limits to employees of the park since Ukrainian troops took up positions there to prevent any possible Russian sea assault.

This means Rusev and his team cannot say exactly how many dolphins have been stranded in the park or survey the full extent of the damage.

– Dangerous sonars – 

In any case, the death toll is “terrifying,” says Rusev, who has been keeping an online diary — now widely followed on Facebook — about the impact of the war on wildlife.

When dolphins started washing up on the coast in March, Rusev and his team had to get to work quickly to spot dead animals before the many jackals roaming the area got to them. 

“Then, we reached out to our colleagues in Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania. Everyone witnessed the same thing: a huge number of dolphins have died since the beginning of the war,” Rusev said.

The Turkish Marine Research Foundation (TUDAV) warned in March of an “unusual increase” in dead dolphins washing ashore on the Black Sea coast.

Rusev estimates that 5,000 dolphins have been killed — about 2 percent of the total dolphin population in the Black Sea. 

The Black Sea was home to an estimated 2 million dolphins during the 20th century, but fishing and pollution contributed to their decline.

A survey found there were about 250,000 of dolphins left in 2020. 

There’s no doubt in Rusev’s mind: military sonars used by Russian warships are to blame for the current bloodbath.

The powerful sonars used by warships and submarines “interfere with dolphin’s hearing systems”, he explains.

“This destroys their inner ear, they become blind and cannot navigate or hunt,” and are more susceptible to lethal disease due to their weakened immune systems, according to Rusev.

The dolphin remains do not show any trace of fishing nets or wounds, which for Rusev is further evidence ruling out the possibility they died any other way.

– Trading blame –

Russia and Ukraine are trading blame even on the environmental toll of the war, so Rusev’s theory is disputed. 

Russian scientists who looked into the increase in dolphin mortality blamed morbillivirus, a common lethal disease for the species.

Rusev and his team took samples from dolphins that had recently been found and have sent them to Germany and Italy to settle the debate.

Usually Rusev sleeps in a cabin next to the entrance of the park.

Today, the carcass of a dead dolphin lies next to his cabin, in the lagoon’s stagnant waters.

Rusev covered it with a fishing net. That way, he explains, fish will eat the flesh, and he can give the remaining skeleton to a museum. 

The scientist, sometimes halting conversation to marvel at a white-tailed sea eagle or a flock of pelicans, is visibly worried. 

Military strikes have already hit the national park and burned 100 hectares of protected land.

“War is a terrifying thing,” he said. “It impacts the whole ecosystem, including species that won’t easily recover. 

“Nature’s balance won’t easily recover either.”