World

The stars appear to be aligned for NASA’s Moon rocket to finally blast off on Saturday, with weather forecasts favorable and technical issues that postponed the launch earlier this week resolved.

Liftoff is scheduled for 2:17 pm local time (1817 GMT) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the potential for up to a two-hour delay if necessary.

The chance for favorable weather conditions within that window sat at 60 percent Thursday evening. 

“The weather looks good,” and isn’t expected to be a “showstopper,” forecast analyst Melody Lovin said at a press conference.

NASA has also been working to correct the technical difficulties that lead to the last-minute delay of the launch during its originally scheduled window Monday.

At first, it seemed that one of the rocket’s four main engines was too hot, though it turned out just to be a reading from a “bad sensor,” the rocket’s program manager John Honeycutt said Thursday. 

In the future, the incorrect information will simply be ignored. 

Then a fuel tank leak had to be patched. 

“We were able to find what we believe is the source of the leak and correct that,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said. 

The Artemis 1 mission is an uncrewed test flight. It will be the first launch for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the most powerful in the world and which has been in development for more than a decade. 

“There’s no guarantee that we’re going to get off on Saturday, but we’re going to try,” Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin said. 

If the mission goes ahead Saturday, the Orion capsule fixed atop the rocket will spend 37 days in space, orbiting the Moon from about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away. 

It is the Orion that will then take future astronauts back to the Moon — including the first woman and the first person color to walk on its surface — in 2025 at the earliest. 

Artemis is named for the twin sister of the Greek god Apollo, for whom the first Moon missions were named. With the new flagship program, NASA hopes to test technology someday meant for sending humans to Mars.

Connollystrasse 31 may be seared in most people’s memories as the address where Palestinian gunmen took Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. But for Mechthild Foerster, it is her home.

When she and her husband found the apartment in 1986, they did not know it would be located in the same building where the terror unfurled.

“We knew pretty soon afterwards, with the plaque outside the building,” she tells AFP, referring to the memorial plate in German and Hebrew commemorating the 11 members of the Israeli delegation who were killed five decades back.

“It is not as if I had the scary feeling of moving into a haunted castle. Life goes on and wounds must heal.”

On September 5, 1972, members of the militant Palestinian “Black September” group stormed into the Israeli Olympic delegation’s lodgings, shooting two dead and taking nine others hostage.

West German police responded with a bungled rescue operation in which all nine hostages were killed in a shootout, along with five of the eight hostage-takers and a police officer.

– ‘Plants everywhere’ –

Despite the atrocities that unfolded at the site, the Olympic village was transformed into homes for locals barely a year after the Games.

Foerster, 85, already knew what life was like in the Olympic village from visiting her sister-in-law, who moved in in 1973.

Today, the 40-hectare (99-acre) residential district adjoining the 80-hectare Olympic park is a thriving district popular with families and retirees alike.

In her block, the apartments once inhabited by the Israeli delegation have been acquired by the Max Planck Institute, which puts up visiting researchers there. Others are inhabited by longer-term residents like Foerster.

Recalling the early years at the village, Foerster says: “It was really hot inside, because it was really only a pile of concrete, a sort of mountain that heats up in the summer.”

“If we didn’t have plants everywhere it would really be unlivable. Now it’s very pleasant,” she says, having just returned from the shops on her bike.

On every balcony of the apartment complex that faces the sun there are potted plants, ivy, and small trees that bring a little freshness in summer.

Soon after the fateful Games in 1972, ramps were built to make the buildings more accessible to disabled people.

With all the roads buried underground there are no cars, no noisy traffic, and parents let children play in the street without fear.

– ‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else’ –

The local school is embedded in the village and no more than a 10-minute walk from home — another advantage for families.

“I don’t think I would live anywhere else in Munich with children,” says Charlotte Haupt, mother to an 18-month-old boy.

“Ours is just a year-and-a-half but the older he gets the more advantages there will be. We can let the kids play outside the house, there are no cars,” she says.

Haupt moved into the area in 2010 as a student in a shared apartment, and has lived here with her partner since 2016.

Tina Wild arrived in the Olympic village a week before giving birth 18 months ago.

“To be honest, I don’t know if we would have bought here had I not been pregnant. For a couple without children, there are more interesting neighbourhoods,” Wild says.

“It’s a village but in the positive sense of the word. Residents help each other out, say hello in the morning, you know each other, especially when you have children,” Haupt says.

“Volunteers sometimes go and do the shopping for older people, go with people on a walk, visit them at home. It’s quite simple and when you live here a while, you get to know each other,” says Foerster.

Israel and Germany’s presidents will jointly commemorate the 1972 Munich Olympics attack that left 11 Israeli athletes dead, after a last-minute compensation deal averted a feared boycott by bereaved relatives.

Around 70 relatives of victims will join in next Monday’s solemn 50th-anniversary ceremony, Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andre Spitzer counted among the dead, told AFP. Separately, the Israel Olympic Committee confirmed a delegation at the event.

The long-planned ceremony had risked descending into a fiasco over a row between relatives and the German state over financial compensation for their suffering.

But an 11th-hour deal on “historical clarification, recognition and compensation” was announced on Wednesday, with Germany offering 28 million euros (dollars) in reparations, six times the amount previously provided.

With the agreement, the German state acknowledges its “responsibility and recognises the terrible suffering of those killed and their relatives,” said Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog in a statement.

“The agreement cannot heal all wounds. But it opens a door to each other,” they added.

At the ceremony at the Fuerstenfeldbruck air base, west of Munich, where the hostage-taking reached its tragic climax, bereaved relatives are also hoping Steinmeier will become the first German head of state to publicly take responsibility for the failings that led to the carnage.

– ‘Incompetence’ –

Held almost three decades after the Holocaust, the Games in Munich were meant to showcase a new Germany. But it instead opened a deep rift with Israel.

On September 5, 1972, eight gunmen from the Palestinian militant group Black September stormed the Israeli team’s flat at the Olympic village, shooting two dead and taking nine others hostage.

Former East German handballer Klaus Langhoff saw the scenes unfold from the balcony opposite the Israeli team’s quarters. 

He described the terrifying moments when he saw the hostage-takers bringing out the lifeless body of Israeli coach wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and leaving it on the street. 

“It was awful. Whenever we looked out of the window or on the balcony, we saw this dead athlete there,” he told AFP.

West German police responded with a botched rescue operation in which all nine hostages were killed in a shootout, along with five of the eight hostage-takers and a police officer.

Then chancellor Willy Brandt spoke of the chain of events as a “shocking document of German incompetence” and created the commando team GSG9 within the month. 

But only weeks later, three hostage-takers who were captured were also freed in an exchange when terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa plane on October 29, 1972, and demanded their release.

Incensed by the chain of events, Israel subsequently launched the operation “Wrath of God” to hunt down the leaders of Black September.

Four decades after the massacre, Israel released official documents on the killings, including specially declassified material and an official account from the former Israeli intelligence head, lambasting the performance of the West German security services.

The police “didn’t make even a minimal effort to save human lives”, former Mossad head Zvi Zamir said at the time after returning from Munich.

For years following the tragedy, relatives of victims battled to obtain an official apology from Germany, access to official documents and appropriate compensation.

In the immediate aftermath, they were offered only a million deutschmarks (510,000 euros) in what was described as a “humanitarian gesture” in order for it not to be viewed as an admission of guilt. 

Further financial compensation was provided in 2002 but still a fraction of what the victims’ families were seeking.

“I came home with the coffins after the massacre,” said Spitzer.

“You don’t know what we’ve gone through for the past 50 years.”

German officials acknowledged that Wednesday’s deal was only the beginning of a long road to laying to rest the wrongs of the last decades. 

“After 50 years, the conditions have been created to finally come to terms with a painful chapter in our common history, acknowledging it and laying the foundation for a new and lively culture of remembrance,” said government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit in a statement.

A man was arrested in Argentina on Thursday for pointing a gun at Vice President Cristina Kirchner, security minister Anibal Fernandez said.

Several television channels broadcast footage of the man aiming a gun at the vice president’s head from close range as she was getting out of the car that was taking her home in Buenos Aires.

Fernandez said police would open an investigation. 

“Now, the situation has to be analyzed by our scientific people to evaluate the fingerprints and the capacity and propensity this person had,” he said

The gun did not go off as the man, who approached Kirchner as part of a crowd gathering around the politician to ask for her autograph, waved the weapon in her face. 

Local media reported the suspect was a Brazilian national.

Kirchner’s opponent party Together for Change condemned the attack.

“My absolute repudiation of the attack suffered by Cristina Kirchner, who fortunately was not injured. This very serious act requires an immediate and deep investigation by prosecutors and security forces,” Mauricio Macri, who was president from 2015 to 2019, tweeted. 

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a strong Kirchner ally who has called the accusations against her a “farse,” also tweeted his support Thursday night.

“We send our solidarity to Vice President Cristina Kirchner in the face of the attack against her life,” he wrote. “We strenuously reject this act that sought to destabilize the peace of the our brother Argentine people. The great homeland is with you, comrade!” 

Hundreds of activists have gathered in recent days in front of the home of Kirchner, who is accused of fraudulently awarding public works contracts in her stronghold in Patagonia.

Prosecutors have asked that the ex-president, who ruled from 2007 to 2015, face 12 years in jail and a lifetime ban from politics.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing that they have said was proven,” Kirchner, a lawyer by trade who succeeded her late husband, Nestor Kirchner, as president, said last week.

Kirchner, 69, is the Senate president and enjoys parliamentary immunity.

Even if convicted — the verdict is expected at the end of the year — she would not go to prison unless her sentence was ratified by the country’s Supreme Court, or she loses her Senate seat at the next elections at the end of 2023.