New Delhi, Jul 18 (AP/UNB)  — India's space agency said it will launch a spacecraft to the south pole of the moon on Monday after an aborted effort this week.

The Indian Space Research Organization said that the Chandrayaan-2 launch is now rescheduled at 2:43 p.m. on Monday. It said Thursday that an expert committee identified the root cause of the previous technical snag and all corrective actions were now implemented.

The mission was called off less than an hour before liftoff of the 640-ton, 14-story rocket launcher on Monday.

Chandrayaan, the Sanskrit word for "moon craft," is designed to make a soft landing on the lunar south pole and send a rover to explore water deposits that were confirmed by a previous orbiting Indian space mission.

The new launch schedule came sooner than expected.

Pallava Bagla, a science editor of the New Delhi Television news channel, had earlier said that launch windows would have to meet several technical criteria and it could take weeks or months for a new date.

Dr. K. Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, said that the around $140 million Chandrayaan-2 mission was the nation's most prestigious to date, in part because of the technical complexities of soft landing on the lunar surface — an event he described as "15 terrifying minutes."

If India did manage the soft landing, it would be only the fourth country to do so after the U.S., Russia and China.

New York, Jul 17 (AP/UNB) — Scientists say they nearly eliminated disease-carrying mosquitoes on two islands in China using a new technique.

But it's not clear whether this will be practical for larger areas or how expensive it'll be.

In the experiment, researchers targeted Asian tiger mosquitoes, invasive white-striped bugs that can spread dengue fever, Zika and other diseases. They used a novel technique that combined exposing the insects to radiation and infecting them with a bacterium.

For 18 weeks in 2016 and 2017, they released male mosquitoes onto two small islands near Guangzhou, China, a region plagued by dengue fever. The number of female mosquitoes that are responsible for disease spread plummeted by 83% to 94% each year, similar to other methods like spraying insecticides and using genetically modified mosquitoes.

Findings appear Wednesday in Nature.

Mauna Kea, Jul 15 (AP/UNB) — Hundreds of demonstrators are gathered at the base of Hawaii's tallest mountain to protest the construction of a giant telescope on land that some Native Hawaiians consider sacred.

State and local officials will try to close the road to the summit of Mauna Kea on Monday morning to allow trucks carrying construction equipment to make their way to the top.

Officials say anyone breaking the law will be prosecuted. Protesters who blocked the roadway during previous attempts to begin construction have been arrested.

Scientists hope the massive telescope they planned for the site — a world-renowned location for astronomy — will help them peer back to the time just after the Big Bang and answer fundamental questions about the universe.

But some Native Hawaiians consider the land holy, as a realm of gods and a place of worship.

Groups of activists sang and prayed at the base of the mountain on Sunday afternoon. They declared the area, which is well off the highway at the intersection of the mountain's access road, a place of refuge and safety.

"This is Hawaiian homelands," said Kealoha Pisciotta, one of the protest leaders. "We're clearly out of their way, we're not obstructing anything, everyone is in ceremony."

The project already has been delayed by years of legal battles and demonstrations, drawing attention from the likes of "Aquaman" actor Jason Momoa, who has Native Hawaiian ancestry and has voiced opposition to the telescope.

Scientists selected Mauna Kea in 2009 after a five-year, worldwide search for the ideal site.

Protests disrupted a groundbreaking and Hawaiian blessing ceremony at the site in 2014. After that, the demonstrations intensified.

Construction stopped in April 2015 after protesters were arrested for blocking the work. A second attempt to restart construction a few months later ended with more arrests and crews pulling back.

But Hawaii's Supreme Court has ruled the construction is legal, permits are in place, and the state has given the company behind the telescope a green light to resume its efforts. The company is made up of a group of universities in California and Canada, with partners from China, India and Japan.

According to the University of Hawaii, ancient Hawaiians considered the location kapu, or forbidden. Only the highest-ranking chiefs and priests were allowed to make the long trek to Mauna Kea's summit above the clouds.

Today, the university leases the land at the summit from the state for existing telescopes and observatories on the summit. A road built for telescope access decades ago is used by thousands of tourists and locals each year, including Native Hawaiians who go there to pray.

Supporters of the $1.4 billion giant telescope say the cutting-edge instrument will not only make important scientific discoveries but bring educational and economic opportunities to Hawaii.

The telescope's primary mirror would measure 98 feet (30 meters) in diameter. It would be three times as wide as the world's largest existing visible-light telescope, with nine times more area.

Gov. David Ige said unarmed National Guard units will be used to transport personnel and supplies and enforce some road closures, but they will not be used in a law enforcement capacity during planned protests.

In a news conference Sunday, Ige said that he "respected the right of people to protest" at the telescope site as long as protesters behave lawfully.

"As construction begins, our number one priority is keeping everyone safe," Ige said, adding that he wants to make sure construction workers and truck drivers have unimpeded access to the telescope site.

 

Cape Canaveral, Jul 15 (AP/UNB) — It took 400,000 people to put Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon a half-century ago.

That massive workforce stretched across the U.S. and included engineers, scientists, mechanics, technicians, pilots, divers, seamstresses, secretaries and more who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to achieve those first lunar footsteps .

Some of them will be taking part in festivities this week to mark the 50th anniversary .

A brief look at four:

Amid the sea of white shirts, black ties and pocket protectors inside NASA's firing room for the liftoff of Apollo 11 sat JoAnn Morgan.

July 16, 1969 was her prime-time debut as the first female launch controller. It wasn't easy getting there.

Morgan, 78, who began working for NASA in 1958 while in college, typically got the overnight shift before launches. She'd be replaced by a male colleague a few hours before showtime.

"The rub came on being there at liftoff," she recalled.

And there was the taunting. She'd get obscene phone calls at her desk at Kennedy Space Center and lewd remarks in the elevator.

The situation was even more strained next door at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The old launch-pad blockhouses there had a single restroom — for men. So Morgan found herself dashing to a nearby building for a women's restroom, just as portrayed in "Hidden Figures," the 2016 hit movie.

"I was there. I wasn't going anywhere. I had a real passion for it," Morgan said. "Finally, 99 percent of them accepted that 'JoAnn's here and we're stuck with her.' "

As Apollo 11 loomed, Morgan's boss went to the top to get her on liftoff duty. By then, the harassment had pretty much stopped.

While NASA's countdown clocks ticked toward a 9:32 a.m. launch, Morgan monitored ground instrumentation, everything from fire and lightning detectors to guidance computer data. When the official firing room photo was later taken — showing Morgan with her left hand raised to her chin — she was listening to Vice President Spiro Agnew address the team after the launch.

With Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins on their way, her job was done, at least for Apollo 11. Morgan and her husband Larry, a high school band director, slipped away on vacation and watched the July 20 moon landing on a hotel TV. As they toasted the first lunar footsteps, he told her, "Honey, you're going to be in the history books."

Morgan went on to become Kennedy's first female senior executive. Retired since 2003, she splits her time between Florida and Montana, and encourages young women to study engineering.

Tedd Olkowski was on emergency standby for the launch countdown of Apollo 11.

His job was to help Collins — should the unlikely need arise before liftoff — escape from the Saturn V rocket, descend 32 stories in a high-speed elevator and then slide down a 200-foot (61-meter) tube into a bunker deep beneath the pad.

Armstrong and Aldrin had their own guardian angels, according to Olkowski, space center workers who, like himself, had volunteered for the potentially dangerous assignment.

NASA figured the astronauts, impeded by their cumbersome white spacesuits, could use extra help getting from a burning, leaking or even exploding rocket, all the way down to the so-called rubber room.

The rubber-padded, shock-absorbing room led to a domed, blast-proof chamber 40 feet (12 meters) under Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A. The dungeon had strap-in chairs, two-way radio and enough food to ride out a cataclysmic event. There was a similar setup under Pad 39B. Neither bunker was ever needed and later abandoned.

Olkowski's regular job was working with the pad's closed-circuit TV system. He was a skinny 24-year-old from Cocoa Beach, but stood 6-foot-3 (1.9 meters) and jumped at the chance to be on an emergency team since he was already out there keeping tabs on the cameras.

With an hour remaining in the countdown, the pad was evacuated by everyone except the Apollo 11 crew. Olkowski joined other workers a safe three miles (5 kilometers) away and watched the world's biggest rocket thunder away on humanity's first moon landing.

"Even though we weren't considered major players in it, we were just there to help the astronauts if they needed help, yeah, I mean it was exciting, especially now when I look back," he said.

Soon afterward, Olkowski quit his job to go to college, then spent a career with General Telephone and Electronics Corp. Now 74 and retired, he lives in League City, Texas, next door to NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Olkowski got a chance to meet up with Collins a decade or so ago.

"I said, 'Mike, I know you don't remember me. It was a long, long time ago ...' "

You might say Spencer Gardner was NASA flight director Gene Kranz's right-hand man for Apollo 11.

As Mission Control's flight activities officer in Houston, Gardner occupied the console to the right of Kranz, just across the aisle. Barely 26, Gardner was one of the youngest flight controllers on duty when the Eagle lunar lander settled onto the Sea of Tranquility with Armstrong and Aldrin on July 20, 1969.

His job was to stay on top of the astronauts' timeline. What if, for instance, the moon landing had to be aborted? Everything downstream would need to change. So Gardner constantly was thinking ahead, considering how best to rejuggle the flight plan if necessary.

Looking back, Gardner wishes he'd savored the moment of touchdown more. But he had a job to do and there was no time for reflection.

After the Eagle landed and his shift ended, Gardner went to a friend's home, where everyone gathered around a black-and-white TV that night to watch Armstrong's "small step" and mankind's giant leap.

Gardner wasn't on duty for the July 24 splashdown. But he went to Mission Control anyway, joining the flag-waving, cigar-smoking crowd as Apollo 11's astounding voyage came to an end in the Pacific.

Gardner ended up working five more Apollo missions and also attended night law school. He left NASA in 1974 and became an assistant district attorney, then joined a law firm. He still practices law in Houston at age 76.

"This is, to use the 'Hamilton' expression, the room where it happened," he said inside the newly restored Apollo-era Mission Control last month. "Other than the lunar module and the command module, you couldn't get any closer to it than this. We were in the room when it happened, and the sense of completion, I guess, struck me later. We had done what President Kennedy had asked us to do."

Navy frogman Clancy Hatleberg was the first to welcome Apollo 11's moonmen back to Earth.

His mission on July 24, 1969, was to decontaminate Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins and their command module, Columbia, immediately after splashdown in the Pacific.

The astronauts needed to be quarantined. Otherwise, who knows what moon germs might escape.

It may seem silly now, but the possibility of lunar bugs was "a really serious concern" back then, according to Hatleberg, who was 25 at the time and fresh from an underwater demolition team rotation in Vietnam.

Hatleberg was one of four frogmen on the recovery team who jumped into the ocean from a helicopter. The others secured the capsule, then moved upwind in a raft. That's when Hatleberg moved in, carrying disinfectant.

Covered in a protective garment, Hatleberg momentarily opened Columbia's hatch to toss in a bag with three of the outfits. Once the astronauts had the gray garments on, they emerged from the capsule one by one onto a waiting raft.

The first spaceman out offered his hand to shake. Hatleberg paused — shaking hands was not part of the NASA protocol that he'd practiced. He recalled thinking, "I was the last person who could screw the whole thing up."

Hatleberg shook hands anyway.

Once the astronauts were wiped down by Hatleberg with a potent bleach solution, they were lifted into a helicopter and flown to the USS Hornet, where their quarantine mobile home awaited them along with President Richard Nixon.

Hatleberg scoured Columbia before it, too, was transported to the aircraft carrier. He cleaned the raft and the flotation collar that had been around the spacecraft, then punctured them and watched them sink with his own decontaminated garment, any moon bugs swallowed by the sea.

"There were so many other people whose jobs were more important than mine," Hatleberg said. Looking back, he's still in awe at what the Apollo astronauts accomplished. "They were the ones who risked their lives to take that giant leap for all mankind. They're the heroes and they always will be — in my heart."

Hatleberg — who at 75 is working again as an engineer in Laurel, Maryland — said he always thought Aldrin was the first one he helped from the capsule. That is until a year or so ago, he said, when a Hornet curator pulled out old footage and zoomed in on the name tag.

It read Armstrong.

Cape Canaveral, Jul 13(AP/UNB) — A half-century ago, in the middle of a mean year of war, famine, violence in the streets and the widening of the generation gap, men from planet Earth stepped onto another world for the first time, uniting people around the globe in a way not seen before or since.

Hundreds of millions tuned in to radios or watched the grainy black-and-white images on TV as Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969 , in one of humanity's most glorious technological achievements. Police around the world reported crime came to a near halt that midsummer Sunday night.

Astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the moon alone in the mother ship while Armstrong proclaimed for the ages, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," was struck by the banding together of Earth's inhabitants.

"How often can you get people around our globe to agree on anything? Hardly ever," Collins, now 88, told The Associated Press in a recent interview. "And yet briefly at the time of the first landing on the moon, people were united. They felt they were participants."

He added, "It was a wonderful achievement in the sense that people everywhere around the planet applauded it: north, south, east, west, rich, poor, Communist, whatever."

That sense of unity did not last long. But 50 years later, Apollo 11 — the culmination of eight years of breakneck labor involving a workforce of 400,000 and a price tag in the billions, all aimed at winning the space race and beating the Soviet Union to the moon — continues to thrill.

"Think of how many times you hear people say, 'Well, if we could land a man on the moon, we could certainly do blah, blah, blah,'" said NASA chief historian Bill Barry, who like many other children of the 1960s was drawn to math and science by Apollo. "It really, I think, has become a throwaway phrase because it gets used so often. It gets used so often because I think it had an impact."

For the golden anniversary , NASA, towns, museums and other institutions are holding ceremonies, parades and parties , including the simultaneous launch of 5,000 model rockets outside the installation in Huntsville, Alabama, where the behemoth Saturn V moon rockets were born. Apollo 11K and Saturn 5K runs are "go" at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

In nearby Titusville, the American Space Museum and local businesses will mark the exact moment of the moon landing by lifting cups of Tang, the powdered orange drink that rocketed into orbit with the pioneers of the Space Age.

Armstrong, who expertly steered the lunar module Eagle to a smooth landing with just seconds of fuel left, died in 2012 at 82. Aldrin, 89, who followed him onto the gray, dusty surface, was embroiled recently in a now-dropped legal dispute in which two of his children tried to have him declared mentally incompetent. He has kept an uncharacteristically low profile in the run-up to the anniversary.

Many of the Apollo program's other key players are gone as well. Of the 24 astronauts who flew to the moon from 1968 through 1972, only 12 are still alive. Of the 12 who walked on the moon, four survive.

A vast majority of Earth's 7.7 billion inhabitants were born after Apollo ended, including NASA's current administrator, 44-year-old Jim Bridenstine, who is overseeing the effort to send humans back to the moon by 2024.

Back in 1961, NASA had barely 15 minutes of human suborbital flight under its belt — Alan Shepard's history-making flight — when President John F. Kennedy issued the Cold War-era challenge of landing a man on the moon by decade's end and returning him safely.

At the time, the Soviets were beating America at every turn in the space race, with the first satellite, Sputnik, the first spaceman, Yuri Gagarin, and the first lunar probes.

JFK's challenge struck John Tribe, one of Cape Canaveral's original rocket scientists, as impossible.

"I was used to facing up to impossible things. We were in the rocket business, so we were doing some weird and wonderful things back in those days. But, yes, it was an unbelievable announcement at that time," he said. "It took a lot of guts."

NASA's Project Mercury gave way to the two-man Gemini flights, then the three-man Apollo program, dealt a devastating setback when three astronauts were killed in a fire during a 1967 test on the launch pad. The pace was relentless amid fears the Soviets would get to the moon first.

Cape Canaveral's Bill Waldron remembers working "seven days a week, 12 hours a day, six months at a clip" on the lunar modules.

"You know how we got to the moon as fast as we did is because we burned people out," said Homer Hickam, a retired NASA engineer whose autobiography, "Rocket Boys," became the 1999 movie "October Sky."

"Come to Huntsville, go to the cemetery, look at all those young men who are dead down there. They worked themselves to death," Hickam said. "Or better yet, go to the courthouse and look at all the divorce records. They abandoned their families."

The pressure was so intense leading up to the flight that Collins developed tics in both eyes.

Collins privately gave the mission 50-50 odds of total success.

Launch day — Wednesday, July 16, 1969 — dawned with an estimated 1 million people lining the sweltering beaches and roads of what had been renamed Cape Kennedy in memory of the slain president.

Among the VIPs: Vice President Spiro Agnew, former President Lyndon Johnson and wife Lady Bird, aviation legend Charles Lindbergh, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov and TV's Johnny Carson. Civil rights demonstrators who had descended on the launch site to question America's spending priorities temporarily stood down to gaze skyward.

The firing room was filled with 500 launch controllers and managers in white shirts and skinny ties, including Wernher von Braun, the German-born mastermind behind the Saturn V.

The Saturn V stood 363 feet (110 meters) tall, the largest, most powerful rocket ever flown. Unbeknownst to most of the world, just two weeks earlier, the Soviets' even mightier moon rocket exploded moments after liftoff, destroying the Kremlin's moon dreams.

At 9:32 a.m. EDT, the Saturn V roared off Pad 39A, its astronauts hurtling toward their destination and destiny 240,000 miles (386,000 kilometers) away. The command module, Columbia, and the attached lunar module, Eagle, reached the moon three days later. The next day, July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface in the lunar module.

Collins wasn't overly concerned about Armstrong and Aldrin getting down to the moon. Rather, he worried about them getting off the moon and back to the mother ship. He kept his fears to himself.

"If it was unthinkable, it was unsayable also," Collins told the AP. "We never discussed or hinted at their getting stranded on the moon. I mean, we were not fools, and we knew darn well that a lot of things had to go exactly right for them to ascend as they were supposed to do."

President Richard Nixon even had a speech prepared in case of disaster: "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace."

As it turned out, descent proved more alarming than ascent.

With minutes remaining to touchdown, the Eagle was rattled by one computer alarm then another. Caution lights flashed. But flight controllers had rehearsed that very scenario right before the flight, and so guidance officer Steve Bales knew it was safe to proceed rather than abort.

Then a boulder-strewn crater the size of a football field appeared at the target landing site, and Armstrong had to keep flying, looking for somewhere safe to put down. Aldrin called out the distance to the surface — 75 feet, 40 feet, 30 feet — as Mission Control informed the astronauts of the fuel remaining.

Sixty seconds left. Thirty seconds.

Finally came word from Armstrong: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

The time was 4:17 p.m.

"You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again," Mission Control's Charlie Duke radioed back. (He would walk on the moon three years later.)

Armstrong descended the nine-rung ladder first, his left boot, size 9½, touching the lunar surface at 10:56 p.m. Aldrin followed him out 18 minutes later.

Working in one-sixth Earth's gravity, they gathered rocks , set up experiments, planted an American flag stiffened with wires to make it look as if it were waving in the windless vacuum and took a congratulatory call from Nixon, who observed, "For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one."

Dave Waldrup of Reston, Virginia, watched on TV that day, his 15th birthday, and recalled thinking: "Wow! What are we going to do next? It's literally not just the sky, but outer space is the limit. And I can't wait to be part of it." He went on to become an Air Force pilot and is now a volunteer at the National Air and Space Museum.

The moonwalk lasted 2½ hours. The Eagle later reunited with Columbia, and the three astronauts headed home, splashing down July 24 in the Pacific.

After spending 2½ weeks in quarantine in case they brought back deadly moon germs, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were given a ticker-tape parade in New York, followed by a frenzied monthlong world tour in which they met kings, queens and Pope Paul VI.

Five more missions took men to the surface of the moon — Apollo 13 had to be aborted because of an explosion — before Project Apollo came to a premature end, the last three flights on the schedule scrapped. NASA put the entire Apollo tab at $25 billion, equivalent to more than $150 billion in today's dollars.

The first lunar landing, at least, lifted America's spirits — indeed, the planet's — when it needed it.

"The Vietnam War, civil strife, racial strife, all kinds of stuff going on that was bad, which I wasn't paying much attention to because I was working so hard in the space world. The Cold War and all of that," said JoAnn Morgan, Apollo 11's lone female launch controller. "It was such a demonstration of the power and the passion of our country."

She added: "I mean, literally, we did exactly what JFK said we would do."