Texas

An uncrewed SpaceX Starship prototype rocket failed to land safely on Tuesday after a test launch from Boca Chica, Texas, and engineers were investigating, SpaceX said.

“We do appear to have lost all the data from the vehicle,” SpaceX engineer John Insprucker said in a webcast video of the rocket’s flight test. “We’re going to have to find out from the team what happened.”

The webcast view was obscured by fog, making it difficult to see the vehicle’s landing. Debris from the spacecraft was found scattered five miles (eight km) away from its landing site.

The Starship was one in a series of prototypes for the heavy-lift rocket being developed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s private space company to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars.

The complete Starship rocket, which will stand 394 feet (120 metres) tall with its super-heavy first-stage booster included, is SpaceX’s next-generation fully reusable launch vehicle – the center of Musk’s ambitions to make human space travel more affordable and routine.

A first orbital Starship flight is planned for year’s end. Musk, who also heads the electric carmaker Tesla Inc, has said he intends to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon in the Starship in 2023.

Starships SN8 and SN9 previously exploded upon landing during their test runs. SN10 achieved an upright landing earlier this month, but then went up in flames about eight minutes after touchdown.

“Looks like engine 2 had issues on ascent & didn’t reach operating chamber pressure during landing burn, but, in theory, it wasn’t needed,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday, after SN11’s test flight. “Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today.”

Hanoi (VNA) – Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group have agreed to conduct a detailed study of the extreme rainfall in Vietnam, largely the result of tropical storms, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

Reports say extreme rainfall has now disrupted the lives of some 1.5 million people in the Southeast Asian country.

The work was getting underway this week with “weather event definition” – the precise setting of the parameters in space and time of the rainfall episode being studied and the data associated with it.

The scientists’ conclusions on the extent to which climate change has had a hand in the latest extreme weather phenomena hitting Vietnam are expected to be released in about a month.

Earlier studies of extreme rainfall by the WWA group included, last year, Tropical Storm Imelda in Texas, extreme seasonal rainfall in Japan and the Indian state of Kerala in 2018, and floods in Bangladesh in 2017.

The IFRC said that the Hieu, Bo, Gianh and Kien Giang rivers all “reached historically high levels, and in some locations floodwater exceeded the previous historical highs recorded in 1979 or 1999”.

Since October, back-to-back storms and floods with widespread and intensive impacts have occurred in the central region of Vietnam, leading to particularly serious consequences.

Typhoon Molave was the most recent storm to make landfall in central Vietnam last week, the ninth to enter the East Sea this year, and it was followed weeks of torrential rain and landslides.

The consecutive storms and floods that are recorded for the first time in many years have caused huge losses of lives and property and severely affected the life and economic activities of millions of residents in central localities.

As many as 235 people have been killed or gone missing, including 80 deaths as a result of Typhoon Molave, while more than 201,000 houses have collapsed or been damaged or had their roofs blown away, including over 177,000 houses during Molave.

Downpours and floods have also triggered the slide of over 1.8 million cub.m. of land, including 744,000 cu.m. as a result of Molave, blocking a number of arterial roads and hampering search and relief efforts.

Economic losses are estimated at around 17 trillion VND (735.3 million USD), including more than 10 trillion VND lost due to Molave, not to mention a large number of destroyed infrastructure facilities.

The IFRC quoted President of the Vietnam Red Cross Society Nguyen Thi Xuan Thu as saying that: “We are heartbroken by more tragic loss of life as this typhoon has brought further misery and hardship to hundreds of thousands of people.”

“Red Cross relief teams are working non-stop to rescue people and provide critical relief as hundreds of thousands of lives have been turned upside down, with so many homes and livelihoods devastated in this massive storm,” she added.

Nguyen Hung Ha, the IFRC’s Bangkok-based Programme Coordinator, said: “This massive storm is another crippling blow to millions of people already struggling to cope with some of the most dangerous floods on record in central Vietnam.”

It’s estimated now that at least 150,000 people are at immediate risk of food shortages, with thousands of hectares of crops destroyed and more than 2 million cattle and poultry swept away.

“The people of Vietnam are tough, but this is among the worst destruction ever seen in many areas,” Nguyen Thi Xuan Thu went on.

She noted: “The relentless storms and flooding are taking a devastating human toll, further destroying livelihoods and isolating millions of people.”

The IFRC has launched an emergency appeal for nearly 4 million CHF for relief and recovery for 160,000 Vietnamese people, on top of the Disaster Relief Emergency Fund’s grant of 500,000 CHF to support local emergency efforts./.

>>> Vietnam hoped to produce COVID-19 vaccines in late Q3

>>> Vietnam to ensure “safety first” with “COVID-19 vaccine passport” scheme

They are all volunteers participating in the state-owned Institute of Vaccines and Medical Biologicals (IVAC)’s COVIVAC vaccine trial injection programme.

Associate Professor, Dr. Pham Thi Van Anh, Director of Centre of Clinical Pharmacology, Hanoi Medical University said that as those injected have to stay for 24 hours for monitoring, the project will only inject 15 people this morning. They are between 18-59 years old.

The next round of injections is scheduled this week on March 25, also on 15 volunteers.

Earlier, on the morning of March 15, the first group of six volunteers received their first shot of the COVIVAC vaccine. After the first injection, they were kept in the clinical trial area for 24 hours so that doctors could continue to monitor, detect, promptly manage and record adverse events if any.

With the first dose, the remaining 114 people will be injected in turn in series, eight days apart each, until April 20. According to the research schedule, each round will see 12-18 people injected a day.

According to the Ministry of Health, IVAC bought insurance for all study participants to a total value of VND40 billion. This is compulsory not only in Vietnam but in all countries.

The COVIVAC vaccine is a product of the IVAC cooperation with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, University of Texas at Austin, PATH Foundation (USA) and other domestic and foreign partners.

The organiser of the trials is the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, with the coordinator for implementation being the Hanoi Medical University. The study is being independently monitored by Vietstar Biomedical Research and all data is being managed and analysed by BIOPHICS Centre (Mahidol University, Thailand).

Domestic experts have assessed that, although only tested in phase 1 through preclinical studies, it can be said that the vaccine’s quality is very good.

The expected cost of this vaccine is very cheap (preliminarily assessed at half the price of the vaccines currently available on the market). Learning from NANOCOVAX – the first home-grown COVID-19 vaccine, the process of clinical trials for phase 1 and 2 of COVIVAC will be faster.

Meanwhile, the ministry has updated the public that AstraZeneca has announced the results of its review on the basis of preliminary analysis of the phase 3 clinical trials of the AZD1222 vaccine as conducted by AstraZeneca in the US.

Of which, the data showed that the protective efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine – the first official COVID-19 vaccine approved in Vietnam – was shown to be statistically significant in terms of 79% of symptomatic COVID-19 and 100% in the prevention of severe illness and hospitalisation due to the virus.

In particular, this phase 3 trial was conducted by AstraZeneca in the US with a regimen of two doses of vaccine given four weeks apart. The protective effect of the vaccine was consistent across all racial and age groups. Notably, the protective effect of the vaccine was 80% in participants aged 65 and over, accounting for about 20% of the total number of participants in the trial.

Regarding “vaccine passports”, on March 23, Dang Anh Tuan, Head of the Communications and Branding Department of Vietnam Airlines said that the national flag carrier will be the pioneer airline to research, build and test the “vaccine passport” in Vietnam.

Accordingly, the airline had its first meeting with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) on the electronic health passport project and was officially proposed by IATA to participate in testing for the IATA Travel Pass application – a secure application for mobile devices that allows travellers to electronically store and manage COVID-19 test and vaccine medical certificates needed to meet coronavirus travel requirements.

The electronic health passport will be connected to testing facilities to receive results and update the status (“Eligible” or otherwise) which the passenger must satisfy. Passengers can share this status and test results with the airline through the app before boarding at the airport.

The IATA Travel Pass has received positive feedback from the Governments of more than 70 countries and is now being tested by more than 20 airlines.