Prepper's Web

May 17, 2020

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By Mike Kruzman & Jon King / news@whmi.com

A new resource guide is available to Livingston County restaurants and bars that will help make certain they are as ready as possible for the day when they can again reopen their doors to the public. However, a portion of it seemingly stands in opposition to guidelines set forth by public health officials.

The Michigan Licensed Beverage Association (MLBA) has released its Ready to Reopen Resource Guide for Michigan bars and restaurants. MLBA Executive Director Scott Ellis said, in a release, that they were supportive of Governor Whitmer’s initial orders to temporarily shut down for the greater good, health and safety of Michiganders. But he also continued, saying, “However, the extensions have shut us down for too long. It’s time to start opening back up or many businesses will remain shuttered forever.”

According to the MLBA, the hospitality industry is the second largest economic sector in the state in terms of unemployment, and is losing between $500-million and $1-billion per month due to the shutdown. Ellis notes that they are already one of the most regulated industries in the state, and says they know how to follow rules and sanitize. He said they are prepared to practice safe social distancing measures, but do not believe they should be restricted by occupancy limits.

However, that opinion may be at odds with the conclusion of public health officials including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Even the White House guidelines for for reopening sectors of the economy call for strict social distancing measures in the initial phase of reopening for dine-in restaurants. Such measures would mandate an occupancy limit.

The 20 page Ready to Reopen guide includes sections on cleaning and sanitation, social distancing, how monitor employee health, and food and beverage safety.

(Logo: mlba.org)

Nestled among Kansas cornfields in a landscape devoid of any noticeable natural topography, a verdant mound can be seen from a dirt road. Surrounded by a military-grade chain fence and in the shadow of a large wind turbine, a security guard in camouflage paces the fence line with an assault rifle. If you look closely, you might notice what looks like a concrete pill box perched on the top of the small hill, flanked by cameras. What lies underneath is a bunker that is unassuming, unassailable and – to many – unbelievable.

By Bradley Garrett, University College Dublin

The Conversation

To the outsider it looks a bit like a secret government installation – and indeed at one time it was. But this is not a bunker built to hide citizens or to protect the politicians who ordered its construction. It is an Atlas F missile silo, built by the US in the early 1960s at a cost of about US$15 million. It was one of 72 blast “hardened” silo structures built to protect nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with an ordnance 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Although it was out of sight and out of mind to the average US citizen, it played a crucial role in a geopolitical agenda of extinction-level significance during the Cold War.

However, that was then. The bunker is now no longer owned by the government, but by Larry Hall, a former government contractor, property developer and self-confessed doomsday “prepper” who purchased it in 2008. Preppers are the people who anticipate and attempt to adapt for what they see as probable or inevitable and impending conditions of calamity (ranging from low-level crises to extinction-level events). According to Michael Mills, a criminologist at the University of Kent, preppers build for situations where “food and basic utilities may be unavailable, government assistance may be non-existent and survivors may have to individually sustain their own survival”.

Since purchasing the silo over a decade ago, Hall has transformed this subterranean megastructure into a 15-story inverted tower block – a “geoscraper” – now dubbed Survival Condo. It is designed for a community of up to 75 people to weather a maximum of five years inside a sealed, self-sufficient luxury habitat. When the event passes, residents expect to be able emerge into the post-apocalyptic world (PAW, in prepper parlance) to rebuild society afresh.

This article is part of Conversation Insights

The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

I spent three years conducting ethnographic research with nearly 100 preppers from six countries, including Australia, the UK, Germany, Thailand, Korea and the US. I’ve hung out in bunker complexes on the Great Plains, with groups growing food in secret forests, with people building heavily armored vehicles, and with religious communities that have collected supplies that they’re ready to hand over to strangers in need. According to these preppers, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is merely a “mid-level” event – a warm up for what is to come. They anticipated and prepared for a disaster just like this one, and – unlike most of us – say they weren’t caught by surprise.

Most preppers are not in fact preparing for doomsday – they’re everyday people who anticipate and try to adapt for many conditions of calamity; conditions which they believe inevitable and have been exponentially escalated through human hubris and excessive reliance on technology and global trade networks. While the disasters they anticipate might – at the more extreme end of the spectrum – include major “resets” like an all-out nuclear war or a massive electromagnetic pulse from the sun that would fry our fragile electronics, most preppers stockpile for low to mid-level crises like the one the world is experiencing now.

Indeed, a new banner on Survival Condo’s website boasts that the silo’s nuclear, biological and chemical air filters can “screen out” the COVID-19 virus. While most of us wouldn’t build against crisis to this degree, or even get the opportunity to, there are still some lessons I discovered that society can learn from preppers and the way they look at the world.

A brief history of survivalism

Prior to prepping there was survivalism, a Cold War-era practice focused on practical approaches to potential cultural and environmental disasters. One of the primary concerns of survivalists was the possibility of nuclear war. This was a threat which they felt was brought about by scientists, elites and politicians willing to sacrifice citizens in the name of geopolitics. Many survivalists, as a result, were distrustful of heavy-handed government and globalisation – they often dodged taxes and the law while relying heavily on the perceived autonomy enshrined by the US constitution.

Kurt Saxon, the man who coined the term survivalism, advocated for armed revolution and wrote primers on how to create improvised weapons and munitions. Some survivalists, following his lead, became radicalised as they worked to cultivate self-sufficiency by breaking away from government oversight. Both Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, and David Koresh, the Waco Branch Davidian leader, were deeply invested in the practice.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the US government persecuted and prosecuted many survivalists in an effort to stamp out the movement, which by that time included up to 3 million Americans. Some of the names involved, such and Randy Weaver (at Ruby Ridge) Bo Gritz (the inspiration for Rambo), and William Stanton (of the Montana Freemen) became household names. Their suppression gave rise to wider frustrations and further anti-government sentiment. Determining that people were becoming “paranoid”, the government then ratcheted up surveillance, which just led to more militancy.

Most preppers today, in contrast, take a distinctly defensive stance in an effort to distance themselves from the politics of early survivalists, focusing more on practicalities than partisan ideological debates. Yet media-driven perceptions often paint crude portraits of them. Walking through the multi-million dollar Survival Condo, built with full planning permission from the State of Kansas, it is obvious that a lot has changed in a few short decades.

Survival Condo

When Hall took me on a tour of the condo in 2018, he explained that “the whole idea was that we could build a green doomsday structure that someone can use as a second home that also happens to be a nuclear hardened bunker”. Hall called it a safe, self-contained, and sustainable “experiment in architecture” – the subterranean equivalent of the Arizona State University Biosphere 2 project.

Biosphere 2, also known as the “Greenhouse Ark”, was one of the most ambitious projects in communal isolation ever orchestrated. The three-acre complex had seven “biomes” under glass. In 1991, a crew of four men and four women locked themselves into see if they could survive in a closed system for two years. It concluded with “infighting among the scientists, malnutrition, and other social and environmental pitfalls”, according to one of the original crew members. Hall, however, remained convinced he could improve on the model:

This is a completely closed system. People try to build systems like this on their farms and they get infiltrated by bugs…rain, and wind damage. We’ve removed all those factors.

Hall said that his bunker was good practise for closed systems, such as space travel. Bunkers like Survival Condo, found as far afield as remote villages in Thailand, are distinctly private endeavours that seek to use renewable technologies to decrease dependence on state infrastructure. Survival Condo is also part of a growing desire to “prep” in the most sustainable way possible without necessarily forgoing the comforts of late capitalism. This is a worldview steeped in dread about the speculative unknown.

But it’s not cheap to buy your way out of the existential conundrum. A “penthouse” in the condo would set you back US$4.5 million while a half-floor unit comes in at around US$1.5 million. Since “doomstead” mortgages are not yet a thing, only cash buyers need apply. Incredibly, not only has Hall sold every space in the first silo, he’s now building out a second one, 20 minutes away. This fact reflects an obvious, and growing, unease about the future.

At another location in South Dakota called the xPoint, which I have visited a number of times over the last few years, residents have stumped up US$25-$35,000 for empty concrete bunkers in the middle of the Great Plains. Originally built during world war one to store munitions, these 575 bunkers are now fast becoming the largest prepper community on Earth.

Back in Kansas, I followed Hall through one of the 16,000lb blast doors that can be “locked down” at a moment’s notice. He waved me over to the nuclear, biological, and chemical air filtration unit for the condo and explained that they had three military-grade filters each providing 2,000-cubic feet per minute of filtration, that “were US$30,000 a pop”, says Hall. “I put US$20 million into this place and when you start buying military-grade equipment from the government you wouldn’t believe how quickly you get to that number,” he said.

Hall’s team had drilled 45, 300-ft deep subterranean geothermal wells and built in a water filtration system that used UV sterilisation and carbon paper filters. The system can filter 10,000 gallons of water a day into three electronically-monitored 25,000 gallon tanks. Power to the bunker is supplied by five different redundant systems – so, if one goes down, there are four backups. This is crucial, since as a life support system, losing power would kill everyone in the facility. Hall said:

We’ve got a bank of 386 submarine batteries with a life of 15 or 16 years. We’re currently running at 50–60kW, 16–18 of which are coming from the wind turbine … However, we can’t do solar here … because the panels are fragile, and this is, after all, tornado alley. At some point we know that wind turbine is going to go too. I mean it won’t make it through five years of ice storms and hail, so we’ve also got two 100kW diesel generators, each of which could run the facility for 2.5 years.

Survival Condo has both private and communal areas, as you might find in any high-rise development. But in this tower block, during full lockdown mode there can be no external support. It must function as a closed system, where people are kept both healthy and busy until they are able to emerge.

Experiments in enclosed life-support systems conducted by the military (for submarines) and scientists (for spacecraft) have often neglected to consider social systems after lockdown. Hall says he recognises that sustainability is not simply about technical functionality. On my tour he opened another door to a 50,000 gallon indoor swimming pool verged by a rock waterfall, lounge chairs and a picnic table. It was much like a scene from a holiday resort – but without the sun.

At the theatre and lounge level, we sat in leather recliners and watched a 4k screening of the Bond movie, Skyfall. The cinema was connected to the bar, which was intended to act as “neutral ground” for future residents. They had a beer keg system and one of the residents had provided 2,600 bottles of wine from her restaurant to stock the wine rack. As he showed me this, Hall insisted that recreation, sharing and community was as important to the condo’s design and management as the technical systems.

Given the severe limitations of underground living, anything extraneous must be eliminated. The entire building must be thought of as a single unit, where the actions of each resident inevitably effects all other residents. This is what makes the bunker more like a submarine than a tower block. In the event of a major incident, the umbilical cord to the world on the other side of the blast doors would be snipped and the clock would start ticking to a resupply.

On the other hand, in an era of surveillance dominated by what some deem to be a concerted push by Silicon Valley elites to eviscerate all forms of privacy, subterranea may be humanity’s last refuge against total transparency – at least for now. One prepper I interviewed suggested that the bunker he was building in eastern America was the best escape plan possible. He told me: “We can’t build a celestial ark like Elon Musk, we can’t leave the Earth, so we’re going to go into the earth. I’m building a spaceship in the Earth.”

The consultant

Inside the Survival Condo, Hall said, would also be a system of rotating jobs for the five years, both so that people would be occupied (“People on vacation constantly get destructive tendencies”) and so that they would individually learn the different critical operations in the bunker. This was a lesson learned from the ASU’s Biosphere 2 project. In fact, Hall hired a consultant who had worked on Biosphere 2 to assist in the planning of the Survival Condo who went over everything in meticulous detail. From the colours and textures on the walls to the LED lighting to help prevent depression. As Hall said:

People come in here and they want to know why people need all this “luxury” – the cinema, rock climbing wall, table tennis, video games, shooting range, sauna, library and everything … but what they don’t get is that this isn’t about luxury, this stuff is key to survival.

Hall believes that if these amenities are not built in, the brain keeps a subconscious score of “abnormal things” which is when depression or cabin fever creeps in. What he said next will no doubt have a strong resonance to all those in COVID-19 lockdown:

Whether you’re woodworking or just taking the dog for a walk, it’s crucial that people feel they are living a relatively normal life – even if the world is burning outside. People want good quality food and water, to feel safe and to feel they’re working together towards a common purpose. This thing’s got to function like a miniature cruise ship.

During the early days of the Cold War, governments, military and universities conducted numerous experiments to see how long people could withstand being trapped underground together. In a 1959 government study in Pleasant Hill, California, 99 prisoners were confined in underground lockdown for two weeks (an experiment which would never receive ethics approval these days). When they emerged, “everyone was in good health and spirits”, according to a spokesperson for the group. It seemed people could adapt and make do – just so long as they knew the situation was temporary. It was like a period of submergence in a submarine: cramped and uncomfortable, but tolerable as long as a plan to surface was in place, a destination in time plotted. That was precisely the model Hall was operating on – though, rather than two weeks, Hall was planning for up to five years in lockdown.

Both womb and tomb

Over 60 metres below the surface of the Earth, we looked over racks filled with 25-year shelf-life food stored on the grocery store level – a convincing replica of a supermarket, complete with shopping baskets, an espresso machine behind the counter and a middle-class American aesthetic.

Hall said they needed low black ceilings, beige walls, a tile floor and nicely presented cases because if people were locked in this building and they had to come down here to rifle through cardboard boxes to get their food, they would soon get depressed.

It was also necessary to implement a rule that no one could take more than three days’ worth of groceries because shopping is “a social event”. Hall said that “since everything in here is already paid for, you need to encourage people to come down here to smell bread and make a coffee and to chat or barter supplies and services”.

We visited one of the completed 1,800-square-foot condos, which felt like a clean, predictable hotel room. I looked out of one of the windows and was shocked to see that it was night outside. I guessed we must have been underground for more than a few hours at this point.

I had completely forgotten we were underground. Hall picked up a remote control and flicked on a video feed being piped into the “window” – an LED screen – much like you might see in a futuristic film. Oak leaves suddenly shuddered in the foreground just in front of our cars, parked outside the blast door. In the distance, the camouflaged sentry posted at the chain link fence was standing in the same place as when we arrived.

“The screens can be loaded up with material or have a live feed piped in, but most people prefer to know what time of day it is than to see a beach in San Francisco or whatever,” Hall explained. “The thing the consultant drilled in again and again was that my job as the developer was to make this place is as normal as possible. All that security infrastructure, you want people to know how it works and how to fix it, but we don’t want to be reminded all the time that you are basically living in a spaceship or a submarine.”

Emerging from the chrysalis

But all this preparation is for life during lockdown. Is there any prepping going on for life after the blast doors re-open? One prepper named Auggie, who was building a large-scale bunker in Thailand, told me: “I imagine walking through the doors of the bunker when it’s finally finished and feeling the anxiety drop out of my body. I imagine spending time in there with my family, safe and secure, becoming my best version of myself.” Another in South Dakota, when questioned about what they might do in their bunker, said:

Well, you could do anything, you could learn how to meditate, you could learn how to levitate, you could learn how to walk through walls. When you get rid of all the distractions and crap around us keeping us from doing these things, who knows what you can accomplish?

The bunker is imagined by some as a chrysalis for transformation into a “model self”, where preparations lead to a perfectly routine existence after which time a person can emerge as a superior version of themselves. Many of us experienced this playing out during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, which for some brought relief from unwanted travel obligations and for others provided a productive period of isolation and privacy. A utopia for some was a disaster for others, who were without the resources to hunker down and were left jobless, sick, and dead.

So in this sense, the rational, orderly, planned space of the bunker is the antithesis of what some see as the pointless acceleration and accumulation of modern life. These narratives contrast the media’s representation of prepping and bunker building as a gloomy, dystopian practice. My research found that prepping is ultimately hopeful, if a little selfish. Selfish because the preppers are looking out for themselves, given that they don’t trust the government to do so. However, as may of them have made clear to me during the current pandemic, the fact that they are self-sufficient has alleviated pressure on critical resources and health-care facilities, putting an altruistic spin on what looks to be a self-centered endeavour. Unlike survivalists, the goal of the prepper is not to exit society, but to help prop it up through personal preparedness.

One bunker builder in California explained to me that that “no one wants to go into the bunker as much as they want to come out of the bunker”. As such, the bunker is a form of transportation, but one that instead of transporting bodies and material through space, it transports them through time.

Hope from dread

To preppers, the bunker is both a controlled laboratory in which to build better selves, a place to reassert lost agency and a chrysalis from which to be reborn after a necessary “reset” of a messy, complicated and fragile world.

In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic it has become clear that the preppers are not social anomalies, but gatekeepers to understanding the contemporary human condition – just as survivalists of the past were a reflection of Cold War anxieties. Spaces like the Survival Condo seem improbable, if not impossible, but it’s the choice to build them that matters, because in action hope can spawn from dread. As Hall suggested at the end of our tour:

This was not a space of hope. The defensive capability of this structure only existed to the extent needed to protect a weapon, a missile – this bunker was a weapon system. So, we converted a weapon of mass destruction into the complete opposite.

But what the preppers are building is less important than our need to understand that prepping refracts underlying anxieties created by inequality, austerity, shrinking trust in government, despondency about globalisation and the speed of technological and social change. The COVID-19 pandemic is only likely to increase people’s dread – and therefore willingness – to normalise prepping practices. So it may well be that the future of humanity is not in the stars after all – but deep under the surface of the Earth.

Bradley Garrett’s new book Bunker: Building for the End Times, will be published by Allen Lane in August.

For you: more from our Insights series:

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Bradley Garrett, Social and Cultural Geographer, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MADERA — For the third straight day, Madera County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) reported no new cases of COVID-19. The county has had a total of 69 confirmed coronavirus cases — but has not seen a new case since Monday.

County officials already have an aggressive contact tracing operation in place and are hoping to ramp up testing countywide in order to get the go ahead from state health officials to enter phase 2.5 of the reopening process.

On Thursday, District 5 Supervisor Tom Wheeler said county officials were working closely with Sacramento to help speed the county’s preparation to enter phase 2.5. 

https://abc30.com/health/central-california-coronavirus-cases/6007545/

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“Our numbers have stabilized and we’re testing more and more people now every day,” Wheeler said. “And the sheriff and all of the folks at the EOC (Emergency Operations Center) are doing a tremendous job.”

Madera County’s EOC in Madera in tandem with the health department has been operating virtually around the clock since the pandemic began in mid-March.

“We’ve got one of the best and most successful contact tracing operations of any county in the state,” Wheeler said. “Hopefully, we’ll get the OK from the governor to go to stage 2.5 real soon now.”

Last week, at the request of the board of supervisors, Madera County Sheriff Jay Varney sent a letter to the governor’s office asking that the county be allowed to reopen its economy more quickly.

Wheeler also said Thursday the County’s general fund is facing “about a $5 million” projected shortfall due to lost sales tax and TOT (transient occupancy tax) revenues since the pandemic began.

“And those numbers could get worse,” Wheeler said. “We’ve got to figure out what we can do to make it better.”

At Sierra Ambulance, General Manager Ed Guzman said his crews were continuing to deal effectively with the virus while transporting and caring for area residents. “So far, no one one on my staff has gotten COVID-19,” Guzman said, adding that his goal is to stockpile a 90-day supply of personal protective equipment — PPE — for his staff. “We’re almost at the goal now,” he added. “We’re just crossing our fingers [the virus] doesn’t hit up here.”

With no deaths so far and only 15 total cases, Mariposa County late Wednesday got the green light from the governor’s office to enter stage 2.5.

Madera County health officials are reporting that 22 cases remain “active” while 45 people who were confirmed with the virus have now fully recovered and an additional 107 individuals are currently being “monitored.”

Two Madera County residents, a man in his 60s and a woman in her 70s, died in late March from COVID-19. Both of those victims reportedly had underlying health conditions.

As of Thursday afternoon, MCDPH had monitored 1,068 people for COVID-19 and had reported a total of nearly 1,500 negative test results to the state. For the latest update from MCDPH, click here.

Other neighboring counties have been much harder hit by the pandemic. Tulare County has reported nearly 1,300 cases to date — and had 50 deaths — while Fresno County has had 1,070 cases and 13 deaths.

As of 5 p.m. Thursday, there were 74,564 confirmed COVID-19 cases across California, with the statewide death toll now at 3,042. Nationwide, according to Johns Hopkins, there have been more than 1.4 million confirmed coronavirus cases and nearly 86,000 deaths.

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LADY LAKE, Fla. — For many Florida farmers — small businesses in their own right — concerns have been mounting during the coronavirus pandemic: How do they move their crop? Will they have workers to harvest the food as the U.S. clamps down on movement? And how long can farmers go on?

“Every farmer in the area — every farmer is affected,” said John W. McKenzie, who runs a watermelon farm in Sumter County called M&J Farms of Lady Lake Inc.

McKenzie’s life revolves around toiling the soil. As a sixth-generation farmer, he’s seen the business change dramatically over the years.

“From my Dad’s day, we used to load everything in bulk,” he said. “You put 2,000, 2,200 watermelons on a trailer, send it on up the road.”

McKenzie calls himself “small time,” with three fields of watermelons totaling about 125 acres; he boasts half a million in annual sales.

Yet amid the pandemic, answering his calling has been challenging.

“Everything affects price. Price gets too cheap, we can’t afford to pick it. And if we can’t afford to pick it, it’s over,” he said. “If there’s no movement, there’s no work. If there’s no work, there’s no jobs, no money. And that’s the bottom line.”

McKenzie sells everything through a broker, who sells to everyone. About 70 percent of the watermelons go to chain stores such as Whole Foods or Publix, while 30 percent head to restaurants and schools, he said.

The only problem is that many of the latter are closed, so much of McKenzie’s crop doesn’t move.

Gary England, the regional specialize agent in fruit crops and director of the Hastings Agriculture Extension Center with the University of Florida/IFAS, said that growers across the board are facing unprecedented issues.

“Just something as simple as the farm has a tractor. There might be three or four employees that use that tractor. It has to be sanitized going in, sanitized going out. Plus, (there’s) the masks if necessary, and social distancing,” he said. 

Farmers are optimistic that they’ll be able to benefit from the $19 billion COVID-19 federal aid package intended for U.S. farmers.

Yet, there are other concerns. While the Sunshine State is No. 1 in the country in watermelon production, the pandemic casts a cloud of doubt over whether consumers will still snatch up the summertime staple with no barbecues in sight.

McKenzie also worries whether he’ll get the guest workers he needs to harvest this month.

“We don’t know if we’ll be able to get as many as we have in the past. But at least we’ll get in the queue,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be back to normal as we know it, (but) then we need to come up with a new normal,” he said.

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SpaceX’s first crewed mission is just the beginning, and the company is already gearing up for what comes next.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the company’s Crew Dragon capsule on May 27 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, sending NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station (ISS).

The flight, called Demo-2, will be SpaceX’s first-ever crewed mission, and the first orbital human spaceflight to depart from U.S. soil since NASA’s space shuttle fleet was grounded in July 2011. But Demo-2 is far from a climax; as its name suggests, it’s a demonstration mission, a test designed to show that the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon are ready to begin operational astronaut-toting flights.

Related: How SpaceX’s Crew Dragon space capsule works (infographic)

Once Demo-2 is complete, and the SpaceX and NASA teams have reviewed all the data for certification, SpaceX will launch Crew Dragon’s first six-month operational mission (Crew-1) later this year. The Crew-1 spacecraft is in production and astronaut training is well underway pic.twitter.com/SVMQMkK6ABMay 1, 2020

SpaceX is committed to fly six operational crewed missions, under a $2.6 billion deal the company signed with NASA in 2014. And the wheels are already turning on the first of them, known as Crew-1, which will send NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi to the ISS for a six-month stay.

On April 24, for example, SpaceX put the Crew-1 Falcon 9 through its paces, performing “static fire” tests on both of the rocket’s stages at the company’s facility in McGregor, Texas. During static fires, rocket engines light up briefly while the vehicle is secured to the ground. (The Falcon 9 first stage is powered by nine Merlin engines; the upper stage sports a single Merlin.)

The team at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas completed a static fire test today of the Falcon 9 first stage that will launch Crew Dragon’s first operational mission (Crew-1) with 3 @NASA astronauts and 1 @jaxa_en astronaut on board later this year pic.twitter.com/iagTmZUXDuApril 24, 2020

And Crew-1 astronaut training is already “well underway,” SpaceX representatives said via Twitter on May 1. That tweet included photos of the suited-up crewmembers, presumably at the company’s headquarters in Southern California, where the Crew-1 capsule resides — for now.

“We should be shipping that vehicle [to Florida] in the next few months and prepping for the first operational mission,” SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said during a Demo-2 news conference on May 1.

SpaceX plans to get Crew-1 off the ground sometime this year, but a specific timeline has not yet been announced. That won’t happen until Demo-2 is in the books and SpaceX and NASA teams have had a chance to assess the test flight and its reams of data.

And we don’t know when such an assessment can begin, because it’s unclear at the moment when Demo-2 will come back to Earth. That decision won’t be made until after launch, NASA officials said.

“When we get on orbit, we’ll again look at the vehicle systems and how it’s performing, how Dragon’s doing,” Steve Stich, deputy manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said during a different Demo-2 briefing on May 1. “We’ll be looking also at the readiness for the Crew-1 mission later this year, and then at a time during the mission, we’ll decide exactly how long we’ll fly the mission.”

The minimum Demo-2 length is about a month and the maximum is around 119 days, Stich added. That upper limit is imposed by solar-array degradation, which is caused by atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit, he said. (The operational version of Crew Dragon, such as the capsule that will fly Crew-1, is designed to last 210 days in space, SpaceX representatives have said.)

The McGregor team also completed a static fire test earlier this week of Falcon 9’s second stage engine for the Crew-1 mission, which will propel Crew Dragon toward the @space_station once the first stage separates and reorients to land back on Earth pic.twitter.com/QYaMgLQeLgApril 24, 2020

Demo-2 will be the second visit to the ISS for a Crew Dragon. One of the capsules aced an uncrewed mission to the orbiting lab called (you guessed it) Demo-1 in March 2019. And SpaceX routinely flies robotic resupply missions to the ISS for NASA with a cargo version of Dragon, under a different contract with the space agency.

Aerospace giant Boeing is preparing to launch NASA astronauts as well, under its own Commercial Crew contract. But Boeing isn’t quite ready for its first crewed flight. 

During the company’s version of Demo-1, which launched this past December, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule suffered several software issues, including a glitch that caused the craft to get stuck in the wrong orbit for an ISS rendezvous. Starliner will refly the uncrewed ISS mission before taking astronauts aboard, Boeing representatives announced last month.

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

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County fairs are still a couple of months off, but Covid-19 has many wondering if the shows will even happen.

4-H often works in conjunction with schools or has activities after school, when the virus shut schools down across the nation. 4-H lost connection to many of its youth activities, in Box Butte County 4-H coordinators have worked around the situation.

“We really got disrupted with doing our normal school enrichment, embryology, a big program we do in Box Butte County, and with the school canceling, we didn’t get that opportunity this year,” said Ashley Fenning, 4-H assistant at Box Butte County.

Nebraska State 4-H put together several virtual learning programs, 4-her’s could participate in from virtual field trips to self-instruction videos.  

Fenning said they are working on getting summer workshops together for summer projects for the youth. 

While static fair activities are in the works, the biggest part of most fairs, the livestock part has also been moving forward with a lot of uncertainty. 

Many of the 4-H youth, who have livestock projects, purchased their animals before the coronavirus hit, or bought them afterward, with hope the fairs will go forward.

Rasine Bolek, a sophomore at Alliance High School and a Jr. member of the Box Butte 4-H Council, has been washing her lamb, goats, and cattle every day to get them ready for fair.

“We’re still doing what we’d normally do this time of year and still being unsure if we are going to be able to show our animals,” she said. 

Bolek and others are watching Purina Show Right videos on Zoom, for information and techniques on fitting and feeding animals. The videos are helpful to the younger 4-hers, to learn more about their livestock since they can’t get together in usual group settings.

Box Butte 4-H is planning out by six weeks for events. Following the guidelines set by the state, but they are still hoping to have the county fair with shows. 

“We can do a virtual show, but it wouldn’t be the same as being in the ring together,” Bolek said. “That’s what most us want, and most of us cherish is being in the ring together. A virtual show if that’s the last thing we have, that’s what we’ll have to do.”

Fenning says no matter what happens. They will celebrate the learning and work the 4-hers have done.

The Nebraska State Fair is planning for a full event scheduled for Aug. 28 through Sept.7 in Grand Island. 

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Starting next week, Minnesota hospitals will again be able to perform elective procedures, which can include surgeries and procedures like endoscopies. Here, Jena Rohlik, R.N., and Josh Lugar, surgery director at Avera Marshall Regional Medical Center, discuss processes in an endoscopy room.

MARSHALL — Weeks ago, as Minnesota’s health care providers worked to build up a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were some services that got put on hold. In a move to help protect patients and health care workers and conserve needed equipment, Gov. Tim Walz ordered a temporary stop to procedures like elective surgeries.

Now, providers are getting ready to reopen clinics and hospitals for more non-emergency procedures.

“We want to offer this care to patients,” said Dr. Curtis Louwagie, an ophthalmologist at Avera Marshall Regional Medical Center, and one of the physicians planning for the return of elective surgeries. “I’m excited to start surgeries again, too.”

Louwagie said Avera Marshall anticipates doing some elective procedures next week — however, it’s taken a lot of planning work to get to that point.

Starting Monday, Walz ordered that health care providers like hospitals, surgical centers, clinics and dental practices can start doing elective procedures again. However, providers need to have a plan in place to help protect patients and health care workers. At Avera Marshall, Louwagie has been part of the planning efforts to restart elective surgeries and other procedures.

When it comes to medical procedures, the word “elective” can be a little misleading, Louwagie said. While they’re not as urgent as a heart attack or a life-threatening injury, elective procedures are still important for people’s health and wellness. For example, he said, cataract surgeries and joint replacements are two common elective surgeries that make a big difference in patients’ lives. The governor’s order had also put a hold on medical procedures and screenings like colonoscopies, mammograms and eye exams.

But balancing needed elective procedures with COVID-19 response isn’t simple.

“It’s taken a tremendous amount of work to get this going again,” Louwagie said. The Minnesota Department of Health gave providers “a pretty detailed document” with the requirements to resume elective surgeries.

For hospitals like Avera Marshall, it will be important to make sure they keep beds and protective equipment available in case there’s a surge of COVID-19 patients.

“We can’t fill all the beds with knee replacement patients,” Louwagie said. Hospitals also need to make sure that they can help protect staff and patients from possible spread of COVID-19.

Louwagie said Avera Marshall has been taking all those factors into account as it prepares to resume elective procedures. To start with, he said, “We won’t be able to do as many surgeries a day as we used to.” They will also likely start with procedures that don’t require a hospital stay.

Avera Marshall is currently working with the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Hospital Association to clarify some of the guidelines that will affect how more complex procedures, like hip replacements, are handled, Louwagie said.

Other considerations for scheduling elective surgeries include supply levels at the hospital, and whether there are COVID-19 patients who need treatment.

“The whole plan really depends on what happens with the community and COVID-19,” Louwagie said.

Avera Marshall has also developed criteria to help determine which procedures to schedule first. Surgeries with a bigger impact on the patient’s health outcomes are a higher priority. Other important considerations include whether a patient might be at a higher risk from COVID-19, whether due to age or chronic health conditions like heart disease or diabetes.

“We’ll have to be doing a lot of pre-screening work,” Louwagie said, to help make sure that patients don’t have the coronavirus themselves, and pose a risk to health care workers.

Precautions against COVID-19 will mean the process of getting an elective surgery will be a little different now, Louwagie said. All same-day surgeries will be done at Avera Marshall’s Bruce Street campus. Patients will only be able to bring one person with them for an outpatient surgery, to make sure they can get home safely. Both the patient and their driver will be screened at the hospital entrance, and they both will have to wear masks at all times.

Louwagie cautioned that the guidelines for elective procedures could change, depending on the latest guidance from the MDH and the Centers for Disease Control. Eventually, he said, “The opening of the economy is going to change how all this looks as well.”

Louwagie said Avera Marshall will be contacting patients who had procedures previously scheduled. People who have questions about getting an elective procedure can call their health care provider’s office, he said.