Peter Senese: Hero To Children, Best-Selling Author. Courageous Child Advocate. Friend

Peter Senese and the I CARE Foundation prevented the international abduction of my niece a year ago. I would like to express deep thanks to Mr. Senese for creating a miracle for our family by stopping her kidnapping to Croatia and then to Tunisia. I would also like to share an important message that during the summer, parents involved in strained relationships with a partner born in a foreign country need to be aware of the possibility of international parental child abduction.

With school out, this is the time of year I love most because we get to spend several weeks during the school summer vacation with my darling niece.

I am eager for 11:00 a.m. to arrive tomorrow because that's the time my princess arrives. And what a day do I have planned!

Tonight, as I reflect on events that took place a year ago, when my niece's father attempted to abduct her to Croatia, and then probably onto Tunisia (it was only discovered at a court hearing that my sister's ex, Mahmud, was also a citizen of Tunisia: something he had carefully concealed from her during their time together), and then God knows where else without my sister knowing, I nostalgically recall how a perfect stranger came to help my family.

Due to the incredible assistance this once-stranger, now dear friend provided, not only was abduction prevented, but as I said, at 11:00 a.m tomorrow morning, my princess arrives.

If  Mr. Peter Senese of the I CARE Foundation did not come into our lives, I am certain I would not be expecting my niece's arrival, but instead I would be helping my sister try to find her daughter. But that's not the case: Sophia arrives tomorrow!

And that is why I consider my friend Peter Senese a hero: he created a miracle by protecting my niece from abduction.  In fact, Peter Senese is a hero because he created miracles for many children and their families.

During the time that the abduction was planned, my niece's father was in and out of her life since birth. He would travel around the world supposedly on business, including Croatia, Tunisia, and the UAE. He tried to be some Mr. Big-shot.

In reality, the international importer was not trading goods but instead, and unknown to us for all this time, he was taking care of his Croatian wife and his other family living in a lavish home in Tunisia.

My sister never knew that he was married until recently! And she never knew that he was a Tunisian citizen until recently!

According to the U.S. Department of State, "Tunisia is not a signatory to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (Hague Abduction Convention), nor are there any bilateral agreements in force between Tunisia and the United States concerning international parental child abduction. And though Croatia is a signatory of the international child abduction treaty, return of abducted children is limited.

Now you may ask yourself how or why did my sister become concerned that her daughter may be abducted?

Because he told her that if she doesn't start towing the line when he's around, then she will never see her daughter again.

What a great statement.

Shortly after that statement, I contacted Mr. Senese via his author website, having read about him and his volunteer work helping stop children from being wrongfully removed from the country.  To my surprise, Mr. Senese returned my email message, and explained to me some immediate issues my sister needed to deal with.

The email was followed by a series of phone calls, including several with attorneys associated with the I CARE Foundation.

Together with the assistance of the I CARE Foundation's lawyers working under Mr. Senese's instructions, and with the help of my cousin, who is a litigator, court papers were filed to prevent the abduction of our niece. 

We were able to create a wall of protection around Sophia.

Literally, that wall was Peter Senese (Last year I wrote about the incredible work of Mr. Senese helping children).

For example, we did not realize the extent of danger and reality of abduction associated with Sophia possessing what we initially believed to be dual citizenship by birth to Croatia. As it turned out, we eventually found out she also had a birth right to citizenship to Tunisia, which is where my sister's ex had actually been traveling to during all those extended business trips, not Croatia.

In addition, even though my sister never knew that her daughter was naturalized as a Croatian citizen, Mr. Senese found out she was during court proceedings. And as he shared with the court, my niece could have traveled out of the U.S. on a Croatian passport without anyone knowing. In addition, it was Mr. Senese who accompanied my sister to the Croatian Consulate to determine if a passport had been issued for my niece. According to my sister, the consulate was very cooperative with Mr. Senese because of his capacity as a director with the I CARE Foundation.

Armed with evidence that my niece had been issued a Croatian passport without my sister knowing, a plan unfolded that we hoped would work.

In court, my sister's ex was asked under oath if he had naturalized his daughter with the Croatian government. He said no. He was also asked if he had a passport from Croatia for her? Rather belligerently, he said to the judge, how could he if she is not a citizen? No!

Well, you had to see the liars face when my cousin Andrea put Mr. Senese on the stand. Under oath he produced a notarized document from the Croatian government clearly demonstrating that not only was my niece a naturalized citizen of Croatia, but she was also issued a passport.

As expected, the judge was not very pleased with any of it. And that includes the forged signature of my sister on my niece's Croatian passport application.

Interestingly, the Croatian passport had been issued only a few months earlier. Which means he was planning on using it to get her out of the country.

Well, that didn't happen, as the court granted all the requests my sister included in her motion at the suggestion of Mr. Senese.  This included placing the would-be abductor on the Prevent Departure Program.

Another interesting aspect of what took place at the hearing is that though we were not aware of my sister's ex, Mahmud's Tunisian citizenship, Mr. Senese hammered that notion in court, and very specifically questioned whether Mahmud was a citizen of Tunisia.  The way this was done clearly caused Mahmud great concern, especially since Mr. Senese stated that Mahmud, who was a legal U.S. resident, was required to answer to the court his citizenship affiliations, and that misrepresentation of his naturalization constituted a federal crime.

I'll never forget how Mahmud starred with contempt at Mr. Senese.

Eventually as the hearing proceeded, and Andrea made a fuss over Mahmud's Tunisian citizenship and then further questioned if Sophia had been issued a passport from that country, Mahmud stated he was also a Tunisia citizen, but Sophia was never issued a passport (something that we cannot prove till this day).

Which makes my niece's likely disappearance to non Hague country of Tunisia even that much more probable. More than likely she would have been forced into an Islamic subservient life as most women in Tunisia do not know equality.  And as for my sister ever getting her daughter back? That probably would not have occurred.

Till this day, I am sure that Tunisia issued a passport on behalf of my niece. The Tunisian consulate, unlike the Croatian consulate, is not very forthcoming with information.

And as for Mahmud, the court ordered him to have supervised rights with Sophia. He has not bothered to see her for over a year. Instead, opting to leave the United States all together.  He has not had any contact with her (though he didn't have that much contact with her in the past anyway: now we know why: he had another family), and he does not pay child support, but you know what? My niece is safe. She is happy. And from all I have seen and know, not much has changed in her life.

Today, I am proud to call Peter my good friend. What he did to help Peter did without ever asking for anything. And that is a hero.

When I think about what is it that could make a man become such a fierce child advocate, willing to give of his time and use his own resources to help families like my own, I realize that the events Peter has seen as conveyed in Chasing The Cyclone give him the inspiration and courage to help others.

Tonight, with my niece's summer visit beginning in only a few hours, I must say I am excited to see her and so thankful to Peter that tomorrow will arrive the way it will.

For information on Peter Senese and his fantastic work with the I CARE Foundation, please visit www.stopchildabduciton.org or visit http://internationalparentalchildabduciton.blogspot.com/

You may also want to visti the U.S. Department of State's Office of Children's Issues, as they are the government agency who attempts to help abducted children.

Finally, to my adorable niece, here is a simple message: I love you! Let the fun begin!

 

How Single or Dual Parenting Affects Early Brain Development

So many of the bad things we see in the news today stems from a person's upbringing during childhood. I have always believed that we are a product of our upbringing and thus a dual parenting approach really does make a big difference in one's development - for the better. 

It’s a study in mice, but results from an intriguing experiment suggests that having one or two parents can affect new nerve growth in the brain, and that male and females respond differently to these influences.

Extensive studies involving mice and rats showed that early life experiences could have profound effects on intellectual, emotional and social development. Negative parenting environments can affect the stress response in young pups, and make them hypervigilant to threats, while nurturing and supporting upbringing can instill resilience and novelty-seeking behaviors. Studies of how new nerves developed in the brains of young pups also hinted at the importance of parental care; positive parental environments tended to promote the growth of neurons in the dentate gyrus, a region of the brain responsible for learning, storing memories and spatial coordination. So researchers from the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) decided to take a closer look at different parenting models to figure out how they affected nerve growth and the behavioral consequences of that neural development.

They started with eight-week old mice and placed them in three separate rearing environments. In the first group, impregnated females were left to birth their litters and raise their pups alone until the offspring were weaned; in the second group, impregnated females were placed in cages with a virgin female who helped the mother raise the pups until they were weaned; and in the third group, females were placed with the male fathers of their litters. Once the young animals were weaned, the researchers put them through a series of tests to measure their cognitive, memory and social skills, as well as their fear response. They also injected the animals with a dye that could track the growth of new neurons wherever they sprouted in the brain.

To their surprise, they discovered that being raised in either of the two-parent situations boosted nerve growth in the dentate gyrus, but especially for the male mice. Female mice showed the same amount of neural growth regardless of whether they were raised by one or two parents, but they still developed more new nerves in the memory-processing area of the brain than male mice raised just by their mothers.

Because the dentate gyrus involves learning, the male mice raised by two parents were also more likely to freeze when conditioned with contextual cues to recognize a threat. Such a heightened sensitive could reflect their denser population of nerves in the part of the brain responsible for such learning and recall.

Female mice, on the other hand, tended to show differences in another type of nerve development when raised by two parents compared to one. Females with two parents developed twice the number of neurons in the corpus callosum, a thick band of nerve fibers that facilitates communication between the two sides of the brain and coordinates balance, attention and arousal. Previous studies showed that nurturing or enriched environments can promote connectivity in this region, and enhance social behavior and spatial coordination. Indeed, in the study, female mice raised in two-parent cages were more adept at navigating a ladder made of uneven rungs than female mice raised by their mothers only. All females, however, were better at the task than males, since the rearing environment appeared to affect corpus callosum development in the females more than the males.

By observing how the parents cared for their offspring in the different situations, the scientists say that pups raised by two parents experienced more licking and grooming overall compared to those being cared for by just their mothers; the sex differences could have risen from the fact that mothers tend to preferentially lick male pups more than female offspring, and in two-parent environments, the other parent may simply follow the mother’s lead, leading to differences in the nerve growth between the genders.

So how are these results important for understanding how parental environments affect brain development in young children? Understanding the potential influence that different rearing situations can have on nerve growth could help researchers gain better insight into the cognitive, emotional and behavioral abnormalities that affect people, the study authors say.

For example, the study also showed that the effects of rearing appeared to last throughout the animals’ lifetime, and were passed on to the next generation. The pups raised in two-parent cages also had offspring that fared better on cognitive and social skills tests than the pups of animals raised in the single-parent cages. “We found that parental attention can directly impact long term brain health into adulthood. It shows there is a mechanism that increases brain cells as adults. The fact that they carried on to the next generation is astounding, which means it is almost imprinted or encoded in the offspring,” says senior author Samuel Weiss, the director of HBI.

Weiss says anecdotal evidence suggests similar mechanisms may occur in humans. “We are not at a point yet–although we will be shortly–where we can actually measure brain cell turn over in the adult human brain. [But] there will be an opportunity down the line to see if the same mechanism will apply in the human population where there is increased parental attention and long term brain health,” he says.

There is some preliminary evidence that Weiss’ findings in mice may have some validity in the human setting; previous studies in humans have found that children raised in a positive, nurturing environment tend to have a much healthier trajectory and are less likely to encounter problems with violent and aggressive behavior, for example, or engage in drug or alcohol abuse. Taken together, that data adds more weight to the importance of early childhood experiences in shaping the brain and, ultimately, who we are.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Today was the day my mother was born: May 22nd, 1921.  She would have been 92 if she was physically with us today.  But five years ago, it was her time to join my father in heaven.

So mom, if you're looking down this way today, know that I love you and know that you are always a part of me.

Happy Birthday, my amazing mother Betty.

You are missed, and you are always loved, which makes the missing part a little easier.

Love,
Ray

Oklahoma Tornado Aftermath Leaves Trail Of Destruction In Moore

Cannot believe the devastation ... my heart and prayers goes out to everyone in Oklahoma.  Tornados are deadly, and appear to be more frequent and larger in size than ever before. 

Pre-dawn emergency workers searched feverishly for survivors in the rubble of homes, primary schools and an hospital in an Oklahoma City suburb ravaged by a massive Monday afternoon tornado feared to have killed up to 91 people and injured well over 200 residents.

The 2-mile(3-km) wide tornado tore through town of Moore outside Oklahoma City, trapping victims beneath the rubble as one elementary school took a direct hit and another was destroyed.

Reporters were cleared back from Plaza Towers Elementary School, which sustained a direct hit Oklahoma Lieutenant Governor Todd Lamb told CNN. But television pictures showed firefighters from more than a dozen fire departments working under bright spotlights to find survivors.

President Barack Obama declared a major disaster area in Oklahoma, ordering federal aid to supplement state and local efforts in Moore after the deadliest U.S. tornado since one killed 161 people in Joplin, Missouri, two years ago.

There was an outpouring of grief on Plaza Towers' Facebook page, with messages from around the country including one pleading simply: "Please find those little children."

A separate Facebook page set up to reunite people in the area hit by a tornado on Sunday with their belongings and pets also showed entries for Moore residents overnight.

Another elementary school, homes and a hospital were among the buildings leveled in Moore, leaving residents of the town of about 50,000 people stunned at the devastation and loss of life. Many residents were left without power and water.

The Oklahoma medical examiner said 20 of the 91 expected to have been killed were children. The office had already confirmed 51 dead and had been told during the night by emergency services to expect 40 more bodies found in the debris, but had not yet received them.

At least 60 of the 240 people injured were children, area hospitals said.

The National Weather Service assigned the twister a preliminary ranking of EF4 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, meaning the second most powerful category of tornado with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph).

Witnesses said Monday's tornado appeared more fierce than the giant twister that was among the dozens that tore up the area on May 3, 1999, killing more than 40 people and destroying thousands of homes. That tornado ranked as an EF5, meaning it had winds over 200 mph.

The 1999 event in Oklahoma ranks as the third-costliest tornado in U.S. history, having caused more than $1 billion in damage at the time, or more than $1.3 billion in today's dollars. Only the devastating Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes in 2011 were more costly. Jeff Alger, 34, who works in the Kansas oil fields on a fracking crew, said his wife Sophia took their children out of school when she heard a tornado was coming and then fled Moore and watched it flatten the town from a few miles away.

"They didn't even have time to grab their shoes," said Alger, who has five children aged four to 11. The storm tore part of the roof off of his home. He was with his wife at Norman Regional Hospital to have glass and other debris removed from his wife's bare feet.

Moore was devastated with debris everywhere, street signs gone, lights out, houses destroyed and vehicles tossed about as if they were toys.

The dangerous storm system threatened several southern Plains states with more twisters. The area around Moore faces the risk of severe thunderstorms on Tuesday, which could hamper rescue efforts.


STORM ALERTS

Speaking outside Norman Regional Hospital Ninia Lay, 48, said she huddled in a closet through two storm alerts and the tornado hit on the third.

"I was hiding in the closet and I heard something like a train coming," she said under skies still flashing with lightning. The house was flattened and Lay was buried in the rubble for two hours until her husband Kevin, 50, and rescuers dug her out.

"I thank God for my cell phone, I called me husband for help."

Her daughter Catherine, seven, a first-grader at Plaza Towers Elementary School, took shelter with classmates and teachers in a bathroom when the tornado hit and destroyed the school. She escaped with scrapes and cuts.


SCHOOL DESTROYED

The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center provided the town with a warning 16 minutes before the tornado touched down at 3:01 p.m. (2001 GMT), which is greater than the average eight to 10 minutes of warning, said Keli Pirtle, a spokeswoman for the center in Norman, Oklahoma.

The notice was upgraded to emergency warning with "heightened language" at 2:56 p.m., or five minutes before the tornado touched down, Pirtle said.

Television media measured the tornado at more than 2 miles (3 km) wide, with images showing entire neighborhoods flattened.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a temporary flight restriction that allowed only relief aircraft in the area, saying it was at the request of police who needed quiet to search for buried survivors.

Oklahoma activated the National Guard, and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency activated teams to support recovery operations and coordinate responses for multiple agencies.

Briarwood Elementary School, which also stood in the storm's path, was all but destroyed. On the first floor, sections of walls had been peeled away, giving clear views into the building; while in other areas, cars hurled by the storm winds were lodged in the walls.

The number of injured as reported by several hospitals rose rapidly throughout the afternoon.

"The whole city looks like a debris field," Glenn Lewis, the mayor of Moore, told NBC.

"It looks like we have lost our hospital. I drove by there a while ago and it's pretty much destroyed," Lewis said.

The massive twister struck at the height of tornado season, and more were forecast. On Sunday, tornadoes killed two people and injured 39 in Oklahoma. 

The Solar Powered Plane Soars Across the U.S.

In the 117 years since the first solar cell was developed and the 110 years since the first powered flight, you’d have thought we would have combined the two technologies by now. When you’re trying to get from place to place aboard the only practical vehicle we have that can travel above the clouds, the sun would seem like the first place you’d look for power. At the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, the Solar Impulse company is at last taking that step.

Headed by engineer and fighter pilot Andre Borshberg and psychiatrist and balloonist Bertrand Piccard, and backed by Deutsche Bank, the Omega watch company and the Solvay Idustrial group, Solar Impulse has produced a plane that is equal parts elegant and improbable. The Solar Impulse HB-S1A has a wingspan of 208 ft. (63.4 m)—as large as that of an Airbus A340—yet it weighs only 3,500 lbs (1,600 kg), about the size of an average car. A lot of that weight is solar panels, which cover the wings and the smaller tail fins. The plane has reached an altitude of 30,300 ft. (9,235 m) and stayed aloft for a record 26 hrs., 10 mins and 19 secs. The developers don’t pretend there’s anything remotely practical about the HB-S1A yet. Like Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, it carries a crew of one. But like that long ago plane too, it’s meant as a proof of concept—and a teaser of what’s to come. ”Our plane is not designed to carry a passenger, but to carry a message,” Piccard likes to say. Message received.

Spacewalking Repair Halts Station Leak – For Now

I just love science and I am so tuned in to anything that goes on at NASA. Someday I hope to be able to go to space !!!!!! 

Astronauts making a rare, hastily planned spacewalk replaced a pump outside the International Space Station on Saturday in hopes of plugging a serious ammonia leak.

The prospects of success grew as the minutes passed and no frozen flecks of ammonia appeared. Mission Control said it appeared as though the leak may have been plugged, although additional monitoring over the coming days, if not weeks, will be needed before declaring a victory.

“No evidence of any ammonia leakage whatsoever. We have an airtight system — at the moment,” Mission Control reported.

Christopher Cassidy and Thomas Marshburn installed the new pump after removing the old one suspected of spewing flakes of frozen ammonia coolant two days earlier. They uncovered “no smoking guns” responsible for the leak and consequently kept a sharp lookout for any icy flecks that might appear from the massive frame that holds the solar panels on the left side.

“Let us know if you see anything,” Mission Control urged as the fresh pump was cranked up. Thirty minutes later, all was still well. “No snow,” the astronauts radioed.

“We have our eyes on it and haven’t seen a thing,” Marshburn said.

NASA said the leak, while significant, never jeopardized crew safety. But managers wanted to deal with the trouble now, while it’s fresh and before Marshburn returns to Earth in just a few days.

The space agency never before staged such a fast, impromptu spacewalk for a station crew. Even during the shuttle days, unplanned spacewalks were uncommon.

The ammonia pump was the chief suspect going into Saturday’s spacewalk. So it was disheartening for NASA, at first, as Cassidy and Marshburn reported nothing amiss on or around the old pump.

“All the pipes look shiny clean, no crud,” Cassidy said as he used a long, dentist-like mirror to peer into tight, deep openings.

“I can’t give you any good data other than nominal, unfortunately. No smoking guns.”

Engineers determined there was nothing to lose by installing a new pump, despite the lack of visible damage to the old one. The entire team — weary and stressed by the frantic pace of the past two days — gained more and more confidence as the 5 1/2-hour spacewalk drew to a close with no flecks of ammonia popping up.

“Gloved fingers crossed,” space station commander Chris Hadfield said in a tweet from inside. “No leaks!” he wrote a half-hour later.

Flight controllers in Houston worked furiously to get ready for Saturday’s operation, completing all the required preparation in under 48 hours. The astronauts trained for just such an emergency scenario before they rocketed into orbit; the repair job is among NASA’s so-called Big 12.

This area on the space station is prone to leaks.

The ammonia coursing through the plumbing is used to cool the space station’s electronic equipment. There are eight of these power channels, and all seven others were operating normally. As a result, life for the six space station residents was pretty much unaffected, aside from the drama unfolding Saturday 255 miles above the planet. The loss of two power channels, however, could threaten science experiments and backup equipment.

“We may not have found exactly the smoking gun,” Cassidy said, “but to pull off what this team did yesterday and today, working practically 48 straight hours, it was a remarkable effort on everybody’s behalf.”

NASA’s space station program manager Mike Suffredini said it’s a mystery as to why the leak erupted. Possibilities include a micrometeorite strike or a flawed seal. Ammonia already had been seeping ever so slightly from the location, but the flow increased dramatically Thursday.

Marshburn has been on the space station since December and is set to return to Earth late Monday. Cassidy is a new arrival, on board for just 1½ months.

By coincidence, the two performed a spacewalk at this troublesome spot before, during a shuttle visit in 2009.

“This type of event is what the years of training were for,” Hadfield said in a tweet Friday. “A happy, busy crew, working hard, loving life in space.”

Spire Permanently Installed on WTC Tower

A little inspiration for your Friday!! Spiritually for so many people this means the world to them. Way to go New York!!

The silver spire topping One World Trade Center on Friday was fully installed on the building’s roof, bringing the structure to its full, symbolic height of 1,776 feet.

Loud applause and cries of joy erupted from assembled construction workers as the spire was gently lowered and secured into place.

“It’s a pretty awesome feeling,” said project manager Juan Estevez from a temporary platform on the roof of the tower where he and other workers watched the milestone.

“It’s a culmination of a tremendous amount of team work … rebuilding the New York City skyline once again.”

He said the workers around him were “utterly overjoyed.”

Installation of the spire was completed after pieces of it had been transported to the roof of the building last week.

The building is rising at the northwest corner of the site where the twin World Trade Center towers were destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The 72-story 4 World Trade Center is under construction at the southeast corner of the site.

The 408-foot spire, weighing 758 tons, will serve as a world-class broadcast antenna. An LED-powered light emanating from it will be seen from miles away and a beacon will be at the top to ward off aircraft.

The addition of the spire, and its raising of the building’s height to 1,776 feet, would make One World Trade Center the tallest structure in the U.S. and third-tallest in the world, although building experts dispute whether the spire is actually an antenna — a crucial distinction in measuring the building’s height.

If it didn’t have the spire, One World Trade Center would actually be shorter than the Willis Tower in Chicago, which stands at 1,451 feet and currently has the title of tallest building in the U.S., not including its own antennas.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a Chicago-based organization considered an authority on such records, says an antenna is something simply added to the top of a tower that can be removed. By contrast, a spire is something that is part of the building’s architectural design.

The tower is slated to open for business in 2014.

Tenants include the magazine publisher Conde Nast, the government’s General Services Administration and Vantone Holdings China Center, which will provide business space for international companies.

Orion Crew Module Takes Another Step Forward

                                           Orion Is Changing Mankind's Destiny

With a carefully tuned-in ear and eye, the world of scientists who anxiously await each of Orion's operational and launch tests in a similar way, I suppose, as to the first time man sent a cosmonaut into space. Except this time around, there is no Cold War, no race to the moon, no 'I am better than you child-like behavior'.  Instead cooperation amongst multi-national teams of scientist rule the day, and with it has come progress!

Completely surrounded by a massive 20-foot-high structure called the crew module static load test fixture, the Orion crew module is being put through a series of tests that simulate the massive loads the spacecraft would experience during its mission.

For those of you who do not know, Orion is NASA’s new exploration spacecraft, designed to carry humans farther into space than ever before. During its first flight test next year, Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), it will travel 3,600 miles into space and return to Earth. This will allow NASA to evaluate Orion’s performance in preparation for future deep space journeys.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems began static loads testing May 3 on the Orion EFT-1 crew module inside the Operations and Checkout (O&C) Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Technicians will use hydraulic cylinders to slowly apply pressure to various areas of the vehicle to simulate the loads it will be exposed to at different phases of the mission.

The tests will run throughout May and June, with different phases simulating launch, ascent, launch abort, launch abort system separation, reentry and landing. Lockheed Martin is conducting the tests based on a set of prototype flight requirements.

During the months and weeks leading up to the static tests, NASA and Lockheed Martin engineers and technicians configured Orion for its placement on the test fixture and staged the associated equipment and hardware that would be needed to verify Orion is one step closer to being flight ready.

The pressurized crew module will be put through a series of eight different load tests, each one taking up to three days to complete. Each test will focus on a different area of the crew module and require a different configuration of the hydraulic actuators that are attached to it.

One of the tests also will allow engineers to test repairs they made to cracks in the crew module’s aluminum bulkhead that occurred last November. The cracks appeared as the vehicle was being pressurized for a proof pressure test aimed at verifying the vehicle’s structural integrity and validating engineering models used to design it.

More than 1,600 strain gauges have been attached to Orion’s external surface and inside the crew module to verify the crew cabin structure. Cameras have been placed around Orion to record any movement during the load tests.

Several other sensors have been attached at various locations around and beneath Orion to measure any deflection or expansion during the repeat of the proof pressure test.

The set of tests are critical to build the foundation for the future of spaceflight since we learn from our successes and challenges.”

EFT-1 is scheduled to launch atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV heavy rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in 2014. The agency’s Space Launch System rocket will begin launching Orion in 2017.

What was once a dream is now becoming a true reality.

Best wishes to our friends at LMSS.

Energy Independence and Other Myths: A Q&A with Michael Levi, Author of The Power Surge

Michael Levi is my favorite energy wonk—and not just because we both had to endure waiting for hours in the cold outside the 2009 U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen. (Though he got in first.) Levi, the senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a smart, pragmatic observer of the energy wars—and he’s an excellent blogger. He knows how to cut through specious arguments on both sides of the energy and climate debate while keeping in target the bigger challenges facing the U.S. and the world.

Levi has a new book out on the energy debate called The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity and the Battle for America’s Future. It’s one of the best analyses of the amazing changes taking place in the energy sphere today, touching on everything from fracking to climate change to the Keystone XL pipeline debate. I had a chance to talk with him about Canadian oil sands, the myth of energy independence and why we need a negotiated peace settlement to end the energy wars.

TIME: We’ve seen other energy revolutions go through a boom and bust cycle. What makes this moment different?

Michael Levi: Two things make this moment special. The first is the diversity of changes that are happening. This isn’t just one isolated area. Today you’ve got booming production of oil, natural gas. You have oil consumption, rapidly falling, rising renewable energy. It’s not just one boom, it’s several at the same time.

The other thing is that there are multiple forces driving the change. In oil it’s not just fracking, it’s expanded offshore drilling. In renewables, it’s not just one technology. It’s wind, it’s solar, both centralized and distributed. On the car front it is everything from better traditional engines to electric vehicles and natural gas for long distance trucking. So when you have multiple trends and drivers, the transformation is more robust.

TIME: Your point is that the best future for America is to capitalize all the options: renewable, oil and gas, efficiency, reduced consumption. How can those things co-exist?

Levi: Take expanded oil production and reduced oil consumption. To tackle climate and oil what we really need to do is reduce oil consumption. That’s where vulnerability stems from. You can reduce consumption and increase production the same time. You balance with lower imports. When someone says expanded U.S. production will lead to greatly increased global consumption and cause intolerable climate change, you have to ask what kind of increased global consumption do you need so that damage to the climate occurs. To get people to use more oil the oil has to be cheaper. if we don’t believe that increasing U.S. oil production will do much to decreases oil prices, and I think that’s still the consensus, we can’t simultaneously believe it is disastrous for the climate.

We can also talk about the electricity world. Abundant natural gas makes the economics of renewables a bit more challenging. But fundamentally, that’s not the big barrier to renewable energy growth. It is still cost and the question of government policy. But there are ways for renewable energy and natural gas to work together. Renewable energy is delivered  inconsistently, while natural gas can be turned on and off rapidly to fill in those gaps. I don’t want to suggest that you can have absolutely everything. There are conflicts. But we are better off when we focus on the real tensions between different sources instead of imagined tensions. There’s enough real decisions we need to make that we don’t need to spend our time focused on imagined ones.

TIME: What are the real tensions?

Levi: The first big place is on local environmental concerns and squaring them with national goals. Whether it is hydraulic fracturing for natural gas or large solar arrays in the desert where people want to protect land, our local environmental desires run up against the developments that can benefit us nationally. We need an intelligent informed conversation about that.

On oil production and consumption, in the near term reducing US oil demand doesn’t have a big impact on prices. You can square increased production with lower consumption. In the long run, if you want to tackle climate change you will need lower oil consumption, and that will affect U.S. oil production. But that’s a longer term issue. On the renewable energy front, natural gas is displacing coal rather than renewable power. It cuts emissions but does pose a risk to renewable energy growth and the development of that technology. If we don’t guard against that, we could find ourselves in 10 to 15 years regretting we didn’t develop renewables earlier.

TIME: We talk about energy independence, but you make the case that oil is sold on a global market. Is energy independence anything more than just a slogan?

Levi: It is rarely more than a slogan. People use the phrase energy independence as shorthand for producing as much oil as you consume. That’s reasonable but you need to be careful not to read into that something much bigger, that we will actually be independent of events overseas. I have found it extraordinary to see analyst after analyst start taking about energy independence as if it’s a real thing that insulates us from foreign events. That’s not true. If in 1973 we could have produced as much oil as we consumed the impact would have been enormous. We didn’t have a free flowing market for oil, or a petroleum reserve as we do now. But the world is different now, and what happens today is important and valuable but doesn’t solve the problem that existed then.

TIME: Does that go for those in the renewable energy community who make the same claim that we need to become energy independent?

Levi: If you don’t use oil you are considerably more energy independent than if you do. Oil prices can go up, and if you don’t use oil, it doesn’t hurt you directly. Those who say we can become more energy secure by reducing demand for oil have a stronger platform. But it takes a long time to reduce demand. You can increase oil production faster than you can cut oil use in cars and trucks because the typical car stays on the road for 15 years or longer. It takes a long time to turn the fleet over. Where people are stuck in the 1970s is the idea that wind or solar can get us off foreign oil. In the 1970s we used a lot of oil in power plants. But today we don’t, and renewable power does not get us off oil.

TIME: We often here about the national security benefits of Canadian oil sands. Are those claims accurate?

Levi: The security benefits of more Canadian oil production have been greatly overblown. They are not zero. In a military crisis it would be better to have more oil close to home, but I don’t think we’ll get into that kind of extended crisis. But when it comes to volatile global prices of oil Canadian oil doesn’t give us a special benefit. When Libya went haywire two years ago, Canadian oil went up more than Mideast oil did. But expanded Canadian production does help keep the price of oil down a little bit and that helps the economy.

There are real climate damages from Canadian oil, but the climate damage and the economic and security benefits are small. It’s trite to say this is more a symbolic debate than a meaningful one, but it is. The real impacts are local, where the oil is produced in Alberta, and those are issues that Canadians struggle with all the time. The U.S. has plenty of environmental challenges of its own without getting wrapped around Alberta’s environmental issues.

TIME: So how do we get these two sides of the energy debate working together?

A: We’re not going to have a world where the Sierra Club and Exxon sing Kumbaya together. But ultimately both sides can get more from an approach that capitalizes on developments across the board than in just trying to beat the other side down. That doesn’t mean a grand national energy plan. It means starting with small but real deals that allow the two sides to work together, as we did in [the energy legislation of] 2005 and 2007. I’m drawn to things like reforming the way we do environmental permitting for energy development, whether it’s oil and gas or renewables. People who want to transform the energy system should be able to do it. I like the President’s Energy Security Trust, where you use some oil and gas revenues to fund renewable energy research and development.

But it’s frustrating because people who for decades talk of oil production being transformational now say if you spend a couple hundred million a year of the revenues from that, it’s not worth drilling. If oil production is as transformational as they claim, it should be worth it even if you just took that money and burnt it. And on the flip side, those who talk about the importance of innovation say the deal is not worth it because we can’t take any more oil and gas development. People should focus on what they can gain rather than fixating on what they lose.

TIME: On the environmental side of things, there’s a desire for elemental change in energy that stems from serious fear of climate change. How scared are you?

Levi: Before I started spending my time on energy and climate, I spent most of it working on national security issues. I wrote a book on nuclear terrorism. In that world you think about risks. When people give me the median projections of what will happen on climate change, some of them scare me, and some wouldn’t push me to put climate change on top of the list. What really worries me are the lower probability but higher consequence outcomes. There are some people who say we can’t focus on those events, but to me, that is the job of government. It is not to optimize society. It is to protect people against big risks that they can’t handle themselves. And climate change is one of those big risks. I’m not in the camp that if you don’t follow my plan, we’ll all die, but I do believe this is a top tier issue. And Not because of the certainties but because of the risks.

TIME: What are energy policies that to you seem effective and politically doable?

Levi: I try to stay away from specific policies. Too often we jump right to policies and fight over the details without stepping back and asking about what kind of future we want. The Keystone debate is an example—we have all these fights over the details, but the question is really do we want more oil or less. But in the near term I’d like to see money taken from oil and gas and put into clean energy. I’d like to see a better way to do permitting, including for new pipelines and power lines. And given the road blocks in Congress on pricing of carbon, I’d like to see an effort to use the Clean Air Act to reduce emissions in the power sector. But as we go further out, the big pieces that we need are to make people pay a penalty if they pollute, so the market can drive us toward lower emissions. We need to clamp down on excessive oil consumption, because we still use too much. And we should take steps to expand access but also improve regulations so we can sustainably grow oil and gas production without endangering people or creating a backlash.

TIME: Is cap and trade still an option for you? We’ve seen a lot of problems with the Emissions Trading Scheme in the European Union.

Levi: I think people have misread what happened in Europe. People don’t want stricter standards for greenhouse gas emissions. Because of that, carbon prices are low. Too many observers have said this is because cap and trade is flawed. The problem isn’t the machine, the problem is the political willingness to take action. People focus on the policy machinery and not on whether people actually want to do things. Transparent and flexible policies are essential to making big cuts in emissions. You are talking about big economic transitions when you get serious about climate change, and we aren’t smart enough to know how that should proceed. That means you do need to eventually use tools that allow the market to do a lot of it, and whether that is cap and trade or a carbon tax or something else is secondary, as long as you have something flexible.

TIME: Each side in energy debate seems to be able to stop each other more than they can promote their own agenda. Will that ever change?

Levi: Hope springs eternal. But what scares me is that this isn’t just a pattern from the last few years, but from the last 40 years. In the 1980s opponents of drilling were very good at getting offshore drilling constrained, and opponents of clean energy were good at shutting down programs for renewable power. But that didn’t do great things for us as a country. If we get back to a point in American politics where people are willing to agree on things, I hope people who care about energy and climate have answers for them that they can embrace. If you don’t have a good idea about what you actually want to ask for on energy, you can have all the bipartisan enthusiasm you can get, but you won’t make real progress.