On the morning of April 14, 2026, at Cotswold Airport in southwest England, a test pilot rose straight into the air. He was testing the VX4—an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, or air taxi—built by the British firm Vertical Aerospace. During the test, the VX4’s eight propellers lifted it like a drone. Then the four front propellers tilted forward, and the aircraft accelerated, no longer hanging on its rotors like a helicopter but cruising on its wings like a small airplane. Moments later, it reversed the sequence: the propellers tilted back up, and the aircraft decelerated, returned to a hover, and landed vertically on the same pad it had left.
In completing this test, Vertical—founded in 2016 and based in Bristol—accomplished one of the hardest feats in eVTOL development: its prototype changed from flying like a helicopter to flying like an airplane, then back again. But a prototype is allowed to fly because a regulator has agreed it is safe enough to test. A certified commercial aircraft, meanwhile, has to be safe enough for strangers to buckle their children into it.
Vertical is among the first Western developers to demonstrate piloted transition, but the April flight also matters because of the regulatory context. Other developers have flown to prove the technology works; Vertical is trying to build a case for certification. “The significance of this flight is that it has been achieved in a way that is aligned with the certification pathway from the outset,” says David King, Vertical’s chief engineer. In other words, Vertical is getting closer to the actual business of running an air taxi company.
King’s journey to eVTOLs began with his work at Boeing in 1989, on a military aircraft called the V-22 Osprey. The Osprey was the first production tiltrotor—an aircraft with propellers that can swivel on their mounts, pointing up for vertical takeoff and tilting forward for horizontal flight. For most of the next three decades, at Bell and then at Italian aerospace firm Leonardo, King worked on civil tiltrotors, the passenger-carrying cousins of the Osprey.
King decided to join Vertical in 2023 because the VX4 is essentially a tiltrotor with electric motors. “The beauty of the tiltrotor is it takes you less than a minute from the time you apply power to cruising on a wing,” he says. “The basic magic of being able to transition from thrustborne to wingborne is proven.” What remains is to tune the system to carry different loads in varied weather and on different routes.
Daniel Pleffken, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, who specializes in aircraft certification, is more measured about what the flight proves. “A successful flight shows that something can work,” he says. “Certification requires proving that it works safely, consistently, and under all expected conditions.” The aircraft still must accumulate evidence from failure tests, repeat flights, and design reviews before regulators will let it carry passengers.
Vertical’s situation is unusual. Since 2023, the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has overseen every test flight of the VX4. Most eVTOL companies fly their prototypes under research flight licenses, but the data they produce don’t count toward certification. Vertical flies under an arrangement that has been accumulating evidence toward certification for three years. “We are demonstrating to the regulator that we have the engineering capability, design assurance processes and internal governance required for full type certification,” King says.
The other two Western developers that have flown piloted transitions, California-based Joby Aviation and Vermont-based BETA Technologies, have done so under the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) experimental permit system. Chinese developers have moved faster—EHang received the world’s first eVTOL type certificate from Chinese regulators in 2023—but under a regulatory framework that Western airlines and aviation authorities don’t treat as equivalent. An experimental permit lets you fly, but does not build the same certification file. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), whose eVTOL rules the CAA has adopted, built a single new rule book. The FAA, by contrast, is certifying eVTOLs by stitching together rules written for small airplanes and helicopters. The European framework “is generally clearer because it was designed specifically for this class of aircraft,” Pleffken says.
But clarity, Pleffken stresses, isn’t the same as leniency. “The FAA, CAA, and EASA are using different regulatory architectures, but the underlying safety intent is not necessarily lower in one system than in another,” he says. The European system is cleaner to navigate because its rule book was written for eVTOLs from the start—but that makes it a clearer test to study for, not an easier one to pass. Vertical’s test flight counts, in other words, because the company has been studying for the right test, with the proctor in the room, for three years.
Even certification would not solve the whole problem. An air taxi is just one piece of a transportation infrastructure that barely exists yet. “The main constraint is increasingly the operational ecosystem, not just the aircraft,” Pleffken says. “Vertiports, charging infrastructure, airspace integration, pilot training, maintenance, and operational procedures all need to mature together. If one element lags, the entire system lags.” Vertiports are purpose-built takeoff and landing pads with chargers and air-traffic coordination—essentially, tiny airports scaled for aircraft the size of a large SUV. Few have been built. The air-traffic rules for how dozens of these aircraft will share low-altitude urban airspace with helicopters, drones, and one another are still being written.
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Vertical Aerospace’s VX4 electric aircraft flies during a piloted transition test flight on April 14, 2026. Vertical Aerospace
The California teacher and engineer accused of opening fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner believed it was his duty to target Trump administration officials, according to a note he sent family members about 10 minutes before the Saturday attack.
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, is the armed suspect federal authorities subdued near the packed ballroom at the Washington Hilton, where President Donald Trump and other White House officials gathered with journalists, a federal official familiar with the case told NBC News.
Allen was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and knives when he rushed a security checkpoint and ran toward the ballroom where the black-tie dinner was being held, authorities said. He exchanged gunfire with law enforcement and was tackled to the ground.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that authorities believe “the suspect traveled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then Chicago to Washington, D.C., where he checked into the hotel where the correspondents’ dinner was at in the last day or two.”
The suspect’s writings
Just moments before the attack, Allen sent family members a note apologizing to his parents, colleagues, students, bystanders, and others for what he was about to do, according to a transcript of some of Allen’s writings provided to NBC News by a senior administration official.
“I don’t expect forgiveness,” Allen wrote. “Again, my sincere apologies.”
In the note, Allen criticized Trump without mentioning him by name. He wrote about lax security at the hotel, saying he had expected more.
He also described his “expected rules of engagement,” writing: “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” He appeared to be referring to FBI Director Kash Patel.
Later, he added: “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.”
The senior administration official said that Allen’s brother contacted the New London Police Department in Connecticut when he received the note.
The department confirmed being contacted at around 10:49 p.m. Saturday, just over two hours after the shooting, “by an individual who expressed concern about the incident that occurred at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner earlier in the evening.” Police contacted federal law enforcement, and the caller was interviewed by authorities.
Allen’s sister told the Secret Service and Montgomery County Police after the shooting that her brother had a tendency to make radical statements, and he had referred to a plan to do “something” to fix the issues with today’s world, the senior administration official said.
A Bluesky account believed to belong to Allen and verified by NBC News included recent posts or reposts that were critical of Trump and his administration’s policies, as well as of the U.S. war with Iran and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Described as a ‘borderline genius.’
The suspect, who was not shot but was taken to a local hospital, is expected to be charged in federal court on Monday. In a press briefing shortly after the attack, Trump called the suspected shooter a “whack job” and a “lone wolf.”
Public records and interviews show that Allen was a trained engineer who once interned for NASA, and participated in the Nerf club and Christian fellowship at his prestigious California university, before more recently developing video games and working as a part-time teacher.
Allen attended Pacific Lutheran High School in Gardena, California, where he was known for his inquisitiveness and intellect, a former volleyball teammate told NBC News. While he had not seen Allen recently, he remembered Allen as a “borderline genius” and “super stable.”
“Other people study hard,” said the ex-teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear it could affect his career. “He didn’t have to study. It would just come to him. He was really, really smart.”
Before he embarked on a cross-country journey, Cole Tomas Allen offered the people in his life a series of explanations for his absence, according to writings that the authorities say he left behind.
He had a personal emergency, he told his colleagues and the students he was tutoring. He told his parents simply that he had an interview.
But Mr. Allen appears to have had a much different and much darker plan when he set out on a train from California to Washington, according to two senior law enforcement officials who say he is now in custody, accused of charging through security outside the White House Correspondents’ dinner and opening fire.
Now, those who knew Mr. Allen are struggling to reconcile the man they knew with the shocking act of political violence that he has been accused of perpetrating.
The suspect, who the authorities have not publicly named but who was identified by the two officials as Mr. Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., is expected to be charged with multiple crimes in a court appearance on Monday.
The writing the authorities attributed to Mr. Allen bounced between remorse for the deception of friends and family and gratitude for a lifetime of love and support. In it, he displayed outrage at the policies put in place by the White House, and alluded to allegations of sexual misconduct, saying that he is “no longer willing” to allow a “traitor to coat my hands with his crimes” — an apparent reference to President Trump, though the writing does not mention him by name.
The two law enforcement officials who shared the writings with The New York Times asked not to be named because they had not been authorized to disclose the information.
It was uncertain on Sunday whether Mr. Allen had obtained legal counsel, and close relatives declined to discuss his arrest or did not respond to requests for comment.
The writing said the suspect had come to the Washington Hilton looking for members of the Trump administration.
“Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest,” the writing reads, apparently referring to Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director. It was not clear from the writing why Mr. Patel was mentioned by name.
The language seemed foreign to Mr. Allen’s neighbors, former classmates, and tutoring clients in Torrance, a suburb of Los Angeles. There, the home he shared was swarmed shortly before midnight Saturday by a S.W.A.T. team from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Mr. Allen was a registered “no party preference” voter — the California equivalent of an independent. His sole political contribution in available records appears to have been $25 to the campaign for Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee in the fall of 2024.
“He seemed like a completely average guy,” Max Harris, a senior at a local high school who had been tutored for several months by Mr. Allen, said late Saturday night as he stood near the crowd of federal authorities and onlookers who had gathered outside the modest, two-story house where Mr. Allen lived in Torrance.
“Like, I never would have expected anything like this from a guy like him.”
Mr. Allen was listed as a tutor with C2 Education, which issued a statement Sunday that said they were cooperating with law enforcement. “Violence of any kind is never the answer,” the organization said.
The authorities have said that the suspect in the Saturday attack was taken into custody shortly after charging through a security checkpoint and exchanging gunfire with federal law enforcement officials inside the Washington Hilton. He was armed with knives, a shotgun, and a handgun, authorities have said.
The suspect is initially expected to be charged with two counts of using a firearm and one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said on Saturday. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Monday in Federal District Court, and additional charges are expected, she said.
Mr. Allen was born the oldest of four siblings in Los Angeles County.
As of Saturday night, Mr. Allen’s father was listed online as an elder at Grace Torrance, which describes itself as a Protestant church in the Reformed tradition.
In 2013, Mr. Allen enrolled at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, an elite research university in Pasadena, Calif. At that time, according to federal data, Caltech admitted less than 11 percent of its undergraduate applicants.
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Investigators worked outside the California home of a man who is being held in connection to an attack at the White House correspondents’ dinner. Credit…Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
Michael is a biographical film directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan. It follows the life of the American singer Michael Jackson, covering his involvement in the Jackson 5 in the 1960s to the Bad tour in the late 1980s. The first trailer, released in November 2025, became the most viewed for any […]
When researchers in Uganda set up camera traps to monitor African leopards (Panthera parduspardus) and spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) in a national park last year, they had no idea that they would record so much more than just those animals. Several of the traps, placed outside a cave known to host Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus), caught on video a multitude of creatures feasting on the winged mammals. The bats are known carriers of Marburg virus, which can transfer into humans and cause a fatal haemorrhagic fever, so the footage offers real-time insight into how disease can spread.
Scientists know that bats can transmit viruses to humans either directly, or through an intermediate animal, from forensic detective work and other studies. The team in Uganda thinks this is the first time that potential intermediate animals have been caught on camera in a known hotspot for Marburg virus, which is in the same family as Ebola virus. “It is certainly the first in such a well-documented form,” says Gábor Kemenesi, a field virologist at the University of Pécs in Hungary, who was not involved in the study.
The researchers, who published their findings today in the journal Current Biology after posting them in a Zenodo preprint 10 months ago, reported videoing 10 species scavenging on or catching bats at Python Cave in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. They saw blue monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis) dipping into the cavern to grab bats, a fight between a crowned eagle (Stephanoaetus coronatus) and a Nile monitor (Varanus niloticus) over two bats captured by the eagle, and a leopard standing almost upright to snag bats from the cave. This might be the first confirmation that leopards hunt live bats. “It’s never been seen,” says study author Alexander Braczkowski, who is the scientific director of the Kyambura Lion Project in Kampala. “Sometimes he would eat 30, 40 bats in a night.”
Dangerous visits
Even more astounding is that the team caught on video more than 200 people — tourists, trainees from a local wildlife institute and children with school groups — approaching the cave during the four-month period when the cameras were active. Only one visitor, a tourist, wore a mask. This is despite warnings posted around the cave about Marburg virus, which has no proven treatment or vaccine.
“I was pretty shocked,” says Elke Mühlberger, a virologist at Boston University in Massachusetts. Contact with caves is the largest known contributor to humans contracting Marburg virus. According to an unpublished analysis shared with Nature by Adam Hume, a virologist at Boston University, 43% of the 21 outbreaks of Marburg confirmed since 1967 have been associated with visits to a cave. For 29% of the outbreaks, cave contact has been ruled out; the remainder have unknown origins.
Bats in Python Cave have, in fact, been linked directly to outbreaks of Marburg. An outbreak in 2007 at Kitaka mine, 50 kilometres from the cave, was traced to bats that fly to the cave. And two tourists who visited the cave in 2007 and 2008 became infected. One of them died. There are conflicting accounts of whether both the tourists went into the cave or merely peered into it; the surviving tourist tells Nature that they went about 3 metres into the cave and “peered in for at least 30 minutes.” Jonathan Towner, a viral ecologist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, who has visited and sampled the site extensively, says that they probably came into contact with bat faeces or urine as the animals flew.
Warning signs
These incidents prompted the building of a partially enclosed viewing platform 30 metres from the cave entrance in 2011, and the placement of warning signs to keep visitors away. “From a tourism standpoint, you obviously don’t want your visitors potentially becoming infected,” says Trevor Shoemaker, an epidemiologist at the CDC who was stationed in Uganda during the construction and consulted on the project.
And yet, visitors are openly flouting the rules and approaching to within “a few metres,” says Braczkowski. This wasn’t obvious before the team set up its camera traps, says Bosco Atukwatse, an ecologist with the Kyambura Lion Project and an author on the study. The area looked “really undisturbed,” says Atukwatse, who has since informed park management of the team’s findings.
The Uganda Wildlife Authority, which manages Python Cave and its surrounding wildland, did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.
Seeing all the animals on camera, and suddenly piecing in Python Cave’s connection to Marburg virus history — “that was the holy crap moment for the whole team,” Braczkowski says. “It’s not just a bat roost.”
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Researchers caught an African leopard on camera eating bats from a cave in Uganda. It might be the first confirmation that leopards eat live bats. Bosco Atukwatse/VSPT Kyambura Lion Project
The man arrested after shots were fired inside the hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was being held on Saturday night has been named by law enforcement officials as Cole Tomas Allen.
The 31-year-old suspect is from Torrance in the Los Angeles region, California.
After he was detained by security agents inside the Washington Hilton hotel, he told law enforcement officials he wanted to shoot officials in the Trump administration, two sources told CBS, the BBC’s US news partner.
In Sunday’s interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche said the motive of the suspected shooter was still under investigation, but that “preliminary” findings suggested he was targeting administration officials, “likely” including President Donald Trump.
Blanche said investigators were now looking at reports that the alleged gunman had assembled the weapon in the hotel, stressing that he “didn’t get very far”.
“He barely broke the perimeter,” Blanche said, adding that the suspect likely travelled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then to Washington DC.
Citing its sources, CBS also said that at least five to eight gunshots were fired during the incident. CCTV footage posted by Trump shows a person rushing past security officers, who then turn and chase him.
At an earlier news conference, police said that security officials and the suspect exchanged fire, without saying how many shots were fired.
Washington interim police chief Jeffery Carroll said the suspect was not struck by gunfire but was taken to hospital for evaluation.
The suspect was a guest at the Washington Hilton hotel where the correspondents’ dinner was taking place, Carroll said, adding that he was “armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives”.
“At this point, it does appear he is a lone actor, a lone gunman,” the police chief said.
Trump later posted a close-up photo showing a shirtless man on the floor with his hands cuffed behind his back with Secret Service standing around him.
Pictures later emerged showing FBI agents and police searching an area at a California address believed to be linked to the alleged gunman.
BBC Verify has been looking into the online presence of the suspect.
Los Angeles County’s voter registration records appear to show he had registered no party preference.
According to a Federal Election Commission record, seen by BBC Verify, in October 2024, Allen donated $25 (£18) to the fundraising platform ActBlue with the money earmarked for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Allen describes himself as a mechanical engineer, game developer and teacher on LinkedIn.
According to his profile, he studied mechanical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) a highly competitive university, where he took part in its Christian fellowship.
He graduated with a masters in computer science in 2025 from California State University, Dominguez Hills, marking the milestone by sharing a photo of himself in graduation robes to LinkedIn. He also developed and released a game called “Bohrdom” to the gaming platform Steam.
On Facebook, photos of Allen – which BBC Verify has matched to those of his arrest at the Washington Hilton hotel – show him smiling in family photographs at Christmas and graduation events.
In December 2024, he was named teacher of the month by C2 Education, which offers tutoring and college test preparation to students, according to the organisation’s Facebook post.
He has been a part-time teacher there since 2020, his LinkedIn profile says.
Jeanine Pirro, US attorney for Washington, said the suspect was now facing two charges – using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.
She added that he would be formally charged on Monday in federal court.
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President Trump shared this photo, appearing to show the shirtless suspect on the floor of the Washington Hilton hotel
For most of American history, Supreme Court justices have done their best to stay out of the news. But more often in recent years, as the court itself has become a political lightning rod, justices have drawn scrutiny — for questionable ethical conduct, for perceived spats among their ranks or for what were seen as overtly political remarks.
In the past few weeks, two Supreme Court justices offered comments that were greeted with outrage and condemnation.
The episodes were unrelated, but together they offer a revealing glimpse of the state of the Supreme Court, on the verge of momentous rulings in the weeks ahead. Only one justice issued a public apology — the wrong justice.
In the first instance, during an event at the University of Kansas, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberals, made critical personal remarks clearly aimed at a conservative justice, Brett Kavanaugh (though she never mentioned him by name). The remarks focused on a ruling from the emergency docket last fall in which the court voted to allow racial profiling by “roving patrols” of immigration officers in Los Angeles.
Let’s stipulate that Supreme Court justices should resist the temptation to take personal swipes at one another (or anyone else) in public. But even if Justice Sotomayor’s comments were ill advised, they were pointed and narrow.
In the other instance, Justice Clarence Thomas, another conservative, chose to use a national platform to unleash his contempt for “progressivism” — both as a historical reform movement and as a modern political identity shared by tens of millions of Americans.
His remarks, at the University of Texas, Austin, ostensibly to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and broadcast live on C-SPAN, dealt yet another blow to the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court, which is suffering nearly record-low public-approval ratings.
Justice Thomas has often seemed to take a perverse pleasure in thumbing his nose at concerns regarding his professional conduct. (At the Austin event, he made a point of acknowledging Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor who has lavished numerous, and until recently undisclosed, luxury gifts on the justice over the years.)
But even by his standards, these remarks demonstrate a shocking lack of judgment. They display the sort of ideological arrogance and intellectual incoherence that have become characteristic of the right wing of the court under Chief Justice John Roberts. This is particularly true in some of the most high-profile cases the court is currently considering, such as those concerning the administrative state.
Justice Thomas’s attack on progressivism, which he claimed “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” is the latest expression of his longstanding disdain for a movement that he blamed for, among other horrors, the rise of “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao.”
Putting aside the historical illiteracy of these claims, what his attack on “progressivism” ignored was that the Progressive Era resulted in no fewer than four amendments to the Constitution, including one that allowed Americans to vote directly for senators and another that gave women the right to vote. These reforms were, by definition, supported by supermajorities of both Congress and Americans in every part of the country. In both process and substance, they were not an attempt to replace the Declaration and its egalitarian ideals, they were a triumph of democracy and a vindication of it.
But Justice Thomas’s attack was not limited to progressives from another century. He spoke in the present tense, going after those who “can mouth the words of the Declaration and parrot its principles” but who fail to grasp the true meaning of the phrase “all men are created equal.” No one, apparently, is equal to Clarence Thomas in understanding the Declaration.
The harm of Justice Thomas’s comments becomes that much more glaring when held up against those of Justice Sotomayor.
In her Kansas talk, Justice Sotomayor took aim at a shadow-docket ruling by the court last September that temporarily allowed immigration officers to consider race and apparent ethnicity in deciding to arrest and detain people they suspected to be illegal immigrants. The court offered no explanation for its ruling, but Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately to justify what he called “brief investigative stops.” (Critics of this policy would come to refer to them as “Kavanaugh stops.”)
Justice Sotomayor emphasized the drastic real-world consequences of these “brief” stops for working-class targets, then went after Justice Kavanaugh in personal terms: “This is from a man whose parents were professionals and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour or the piece like I do.”
It was perhaps an unfair dig at a colleague. At worst, Justice Sotomayor violated the court’s informal code of silence, which restrains the justices from attacking their colleagues in public. Or so we are led to believe. You might recall Justice Antonin Scalia’s constant and withering mockery of justices he disagreed with. In his dissent from the court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Justice Scalia wrote that he would “hide my head in a bag” before signing on to such an opinion, which he described as a collection of “straining-to-be-memorable passages” filled with “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”
The point is that the justices are grown-ups, and a little intemperate criticism, even from a colleague, is a small price to pay for having one of the most powerful jobs in the world.
Still, in the aftermath of these recent episodes, Justice Sotomayor called her remarks “inappropriate” and said that she had personally apologized to Justice Kavanaugh.
Justice Thomas has apologized to no one.
We’ve come to expect diatribes against entire swaths of the country from the Trump administration, but to hear a Supreme Court justice do it is somehow more chilling.
All Supreme Court justices are at risk of huffing their own fumes. It comes along with the lifetime appointment, the endless cosseting and flattery. It’s easy for them to forget that they play a unique role in American life, and are held to a higher standard of behavior than the rest of us. In 2016, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made inappropriate and highly prejudicial public comments about Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate. (She also said she regretted those comments. Why does it always seem to be the women who have the courage to say that they made a mistake?)
These days, the Supreme Court sometimes feels as if it is slowly coming apart, the victim of both its own members’ arrogance and the hardball politics that Senate Republicans used to pack the court with right-wingers over the past decade.
Now, in these latest incidents, two justices gave us two visions of the court. One was of a court that would work for America: tough-minded, passionate and willing to admit error. The other was of the court we have: smug, unapologetic and gleefully divisive.
Meanwhile, the millions of Americans who are no less devoted than Justice Thomas to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration must wonder where they might go for an apology.
More than 100 retired NASA astronauts have banded together to form a new nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting U.S. constitutional principles. The group, Astronauts for America, said in an open letter released on Tuesday that its members “believe deeply in the principles that have propelled our nation for 250 years,” such as the rule of law, checks and balances, and the peaceful transition of power.
“I think we’ve all been getting concerned for quite a number of years about not being comfortable with the way some things are going,” says Astronauts for America co-founder and former astronaut Linda Godwin. “It was powerful to find out that a lot of us felt the same way, and there’s a stronger voice together.”
Godwin flew on NASA’s space shuttle four times between 1991 and 2001 and also served on the International Space Station during that period. She says that many astronauts have become concerned over the recent decline in public trust in government and science, and the now heightened levels of political polarization.
“Civil discourse is not working well right now, and it’s enough of a concern that we just wanted to speak up now,” she says. “In our time as astronauts, we learned that when you see something, you speak up.”
In the open letter, Astronauts for America highlighted how cooperation, regardless of political beliefs, is vital to the success of NASA’s mission.
The group plans to release scorecards rating national political candidates on how well they adhere to the Constitution and the rule of law. The group also plans to meet with policymakers to lobby for “evidence-based leadership,” Astronauts for America said in a statement.
The astronauts who have signed on to support the organization span several generations of crewed spaceflight. Among the members are Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweickart, former deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center and retired astronaut Ellen Ochoa, and former astronaut Scott Kelly, who is the brother of fellow retired astronaut and current Democratic senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. While all the group’s members have been to space, Godwin says that it is a diverse and nonpartisan coalition.
“We see the same core values of respecting our Constitution and rule of law as extending across all parties,” she says. “We can have people on both sides that are not doing a good job at representing the people, particularly in Congress, which is the closest thing to the voice of the American people.”
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
