Things To Do In SW Florida

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — It’s still covered up in what looks like the world’s largest PEZ dispenser, but the core stage booster for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II moon mission arrived by barge to Florida on Tuesday.

The 212-foot-long tank still sits sheltered within NASA’s Pegasus barge with its ridged, football-field-length silver dome protecting the Boeing-built hardware that cost more than $1 billion to manufacture.

The barge is docked at KSC’s Turn Basin after completing the 900-mile trip from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Plans are to haul the stage over to the neighboring Vehicle Assembly Building on Wednesday.

It still has months of checkouts laying on its side before it will go vertical to be stacked alongside the two solid rocket boosters from Northrop Grumman that remain stored in segments at the nearby Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility. Stacking won’t begin until at least September, Artemis II Mission Manager Matthew Ramsey said. read more

Revenue at Universal’s theme parks was down nearly 11% in the second quarter,  Comcast revealed during an earnings call with analysts Tuesday.

Executives blamed the revenue drop on lower attendance following the post-pandemic surge and the lack of new attractions in Orlando. Two-thirds of the decrease was tied to lower attendance at the company’s parks in Florida and California.

“Going back to 2022 and 2023, parks were clearly the early beneficiaries of substantial rebounds in tourism and travel after the pandemic, resulting in a surge in demand that contributed to us reaching record results for both of those years,” said Michael Cavanagh, president of Comcast Corp., the parent company of NBCUniversal.

“More recently, other travel options, including cruises and international tourism, given the strength of the dollar, have experienced their own surge in demand, which caused visitation rates at our parks to normalize,” he said.

The most recent quarter — spanning April, May and June — is caught in the lull between the record post-pandemic years and the scheduled opening of Epic Universe theme park in Orlando in 2025, said Jason Armstrong, Comcast’s chief financial officer. read more

By DAVID KOENIG and MATT OTT

U.S. regulators are investigating how Delta Air Lines is treating passengers affected by canceled and delayed flights as the airline struggles to recover from a global technology outage.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced the Delta investigation on the X social media platform Tuesday “to ensure the airline is following the law and taking care of its passengers during continued widespread disruptions.”

“All airline passengers have the right to be treated fairly, and I will make sure that right is upheld,” Buttigieg said.

Delta and its Delta Connection partners canceled about 500 flights on Tuesday by midday on the East Coast, accounting for about two-thirds of all cancellations in the United States, according to FlightAware.

The outage began Thursday night into Friday morning, after a faulty software upgrade from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike to more than 8 million Microsoft computers around the world.

The Atlanta-based carrier has canceled more than 6,600 flights since the outage started, far more than any other airline, according to figures from FlightAware and travel-data provider Cirium. read more