Things To Do In SW Florida

The spacecraft has left the building.

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, set to take its first humans on board during the Crew Flight Test mission next month, was transported from Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center on a 10-mile trip to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

It arrived at United Launch Alliance’s Vertical Integration Facility early Tuesday where it was placed atop an Atlas V rocket ahead of the planned launch from Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 41 as early as May 6. The capsule will take NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on a planned eight-day mission to the International Space Station.

A moment in history.#Starliner is making the turn past @NASA‘s historic Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).

The VAB is where the Saturn V rocket and the Space Shuttle were assembled. Today it’s where the Space Launch System rocket is assembled ahead of Artemis missions. pic.twitter.com/Yht8CrIdX5

— Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) April 16, 2024 read more

A year after St. Cloud adopted strict new architectural standards, the City Council is considering another ordinance requiring developers to install public art in their new subdivisions or pay into a public art fund.

Slated for a final public hearing and vote on April 25, it states that developers of non-residential commercial projects and residential subdivisions must pay 1% of the total development costs for public art in their project or on city property, or to pay that amount into the city’s public art fund before they can start construction.

The contribution is capped at $500,000 for commercial projects and $1 million for residential projects, according to a report in GrowthSpotter.

Community Development Director Melissa Dunklin said the ordinance was drafted at the direction of the City Council, who wanted the existing ordinance expanded beyond just the central business district.

Public art fees or requirements are fairly common for commercial projects, especially in urban areas. What is less common is for cities to apply the standards citywide, particularly to new residential neighborhoods. read more

An object that hit a Florida home in March was part of debris released from the International Space Station three years earlier, NASA has revealed.

Homeowner Alejandro Otero recently told television station WINK that he was on vacation when his son told him what had happened to his house in Naples. Otero came home early to check on the house, finding the object had ripped through his ceiling and torn up the flooring.

“I was shaking. I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage,” Otero said. “I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.”

NASA said the hand-sized chunk of metal came from a pallet of nickel hydride batteries jettisoned from the ISS in March 2021 after new lithium-ion batteries arrived at the station.

The debris, weighing less than 2 pounds, was determined to be part of the support equipment in space used to mount the batteries onto a cargo pallet. The entire pallet weighed about 5,800 pounds, and NASA expected it to burn up entirely on reentry. read more

NASA still wants to bring samples back from Mars being gathered by the Perseverance rover, but ballooning costs for the return trip to Earth under a limited budget that would force years of delays is prompting the agency to seek out a cheaper, faster plan. 

“We are committed to retrieving the samples that are there, at least some of those samples,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a news conference Monday. “This bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long.”

He noted that Perseverance, which launched from Cape Canaveral in 2020 on a ULA  Atlas V and arrived at Mars in 2021, continues to collect what will be more than 30 rock and soil samples, some of which will be in the rover and others left in preplanned spots on the surface.

The original Mars Sample Return (MSR) plan called for a new spacecraft to land on Mars with an ascent vehicle that would take the samples to a rendezvous with a second spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency orbiting Mars. It would then make the return flight home to Earth. read more