Austrian daredevil, Felix Baumgartner, 43, aviation pioneer, B.A.S.E jumper and a world renowned extreme athlete is all set to break not only one but a number of world records. For this purpose he along with Red Bull Stratos team which whom he has been practicing for years to break the record of the highest altitude jump which was set 52 years ago. A special capsule has been prepared for this purpose.
It had been through a series of tests at an altitude chamber in Brooks City Base in San Antonio, Texas. This capsule that weighed 1.315 kgs was the one in which Baumgartner used to test jump from an altitude of 29,610 meters in July this year at a speed of 864 kmph. Now on October 8th, Baumgartner will attempt the world record once again wherein he will be breaking records for highest speed in freefall, highest jump, highest manned balloon flight and longest freefall.
The balloon itself is made of plastic, 1/10th the thickness of a Ziploc bag and is an 850.000 cubic meter helium balloon. Weather conditions permitting, Baumgartner will attempt this feat at Roswell, New Mexico where he will jump from an altitude of 36,576 meters. If successful this will be the world's highest ever skydive. The current record for the same feat stands at 31,333 meters and was set in 1960 by US Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger who now serves as the adviser for Baumgartner's mission.
New details have emerged of the large-scale response to a Taliban attack last week on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan's Helmand province.
The BBC has been given exclusive access to the US Marines and Royal Air Force gunners who were involved in the counter-attack.
The Taliban attackers who broke through Camp Bastion's perimeter chose the darkest night of the year to launch their assault.
They quickly made their way to the US Marine Harrier flight line.
They were dressed in American army uniforms but, instead of boots, they wore training shoes.
Their beards were another give-away, but the darkness meant that the coalition forces on the base only realised they were insurgents when they opened fire.
In quick succession, they fired rocket-propelled grenades at eight Harrier jump jets under canvas hangers, destroying six and damaging two.
Trained riflemen
Capt Kevin Smalley of Marine Attack Squadron 211 had just finished a combat mission when he heard the first explosion.
Every Marine, whether a mechanic or pilot, is a trained rifleman.He said: "I didn't get a good bead on how many enemy were out there because it was very smoky and there were a lot of flames and explosions as our rounds were cooking off. But I could see at least one enemy from my position, as I secured the area."
Squadron Commander Lt Col Chris Raible ran 150 metres across open ground under fire. He was carrying only his service pistol.
As he lay down, shooting at the insurgents, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded nearby, killing him.
Sgt Bradley Atwell was also killed by an RPG as he pushed forward with a counter-attack.
Capt Smalley said: "Lt Col Raible was one of the best Harrier pilots we have in the entire fleet... He wrote on many of the tactics and techniques that the Harrier uses."
Firefight
Bastion is one of the biggest camps in Afghanistan - its perimeter is 37km in length.
It appears the Taliban got close to the perimeter through a network of dry river beds that run along the camp perimrter. Although Bastion is in an area of desert, the surroundings are not uninhabited.
The Royal Air Force's 51 squadron, the base's quick response force, crossed the runway in two heavily-armed, Coyote open-topped vehicles.
A four-and-a-half hour long firefight then ensued.
Sgt Roy "Doc" Geddes was one of those leading the counter-attack.
"This is something we weren't expecting, the base is quite well defended," he said.
"Obviously they've found the weak point, and managed to exploit that and get on to the base, but once they were on they were dealt with effectively and quickly."
The airfield's four fire appliances made their way to the site (nearby fuel pits had also been set alight). They needed to be resupplied with water three times.
"The flames were about 100ft," said Sgt Simon Allsop, watch manager of the Red Watch in Camp Bastion's fire section.
"And there were more flames from the Harriers, there were large thuds going off, explosions going on, obviously from rocket attack.
Attack helicopters were called in too - from Prince Harry's squadron. The Prince was not involved in the counter-attack: he was taken to a secure location on the base.
American helicopters killed the three remaining Taliban, who had hidden behind concrete blast walls. In total 14 were killed, and one was injured.
Their tactics bore all the hallmarks of the Haqqani network, a Taliban affiliate based in Pakistan.
At Bastion, military sources were not commenting, an investigation is underway.
The one surviving insurgent is believed to be undergoing treatment at Bastion's hospital.
Within hours of the attack, parts of the Bastion runway were operational again.
Two new Harriers arrived at the base earlier this week; four more will follow shortly.
The two that weren't destroyed by the Taliban will be returned to the US for extensive repairs.
WASHINGTON — The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans has dealt the Central Intelligence Agency a major setback in its intelligence-gathering efforts at a time of increasing instability in the North African nation.
Among the more than two dozen American personnel evacuated from the city after the assault on the American mission and a nearby annex were about a dozen C.I.A. operatives and contractors, who played a crucial role in conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.
“It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss,” said one American official who has served in Libya and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the F.B.I. is still investigating the attack. “We got our eyes poked out.”
The C.I.A.’s surveillance targets in Benghazi and eastern Libya include Ansar al-Sharia, a militia that some have blamed for the attack, as well as suspected members of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Eastern Libya is also being buffeted by strong crosscurrents that intelligence operatives are trying to monitor closely. The killing of Mr. Stevens has ignited public anger against the militias, underscored on Friday when thousands of Libyans took to the streets of Benghazi to demand that the groups be disarmed. The makeup of militias varies widely; some are moderate, while others are ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis.
“The region’s deeply entrenched Salafi community is undergoing significant upheaval, with debate raging between a current that is amenable to political integration and a more militant strand that opposes democracy,” Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who closely follows Libya and visited there recently, wrote in a paper this month, “The Struggle for Security in Eastern Libya.”
American intelligence operatives also assisted State Department contractors and Libyan officials in tracking shoulder-fired missiles taken from the former arsenals of the former Libyan Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces; they aided in efforts to secure Libya’s chemical weapons stockpiles; and they helped train Libya’s new intelligence service, officials said.
Senior American officials acknowledged the intelligence setback, but insisted that information was still being collected using a variety of informants on the ground, systems that intercept electronic communications like cellphone conversations and satellite imagery. “The U.S. isn’t close to being blind in Benghazi and eastern Libya,” said an American official.
Spokesmen for the C.I.A., the State Department and the White House declined to comment on the matter on Sunday.
Within months of the start of Libyan revolution in February 2011, the C.I.A. began building a meaningful but covert presence in Benghazi, a locus of the rebel efforts to oust the government of Colonel Qaddafi.
Though the agency has been cooperating with the new post-Qaddafi Libyan intelligence service, the size of the C.I.A.’s presence in Benghazi apparently surprised some Libyan leaders. The deputy prime minister, Mustafa Abushagour, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal last week saying that he learned about some of the delicate American operations in Benghazi only after the attack on the mission, in large part because a surprisingly large number of Americans showed up at the Benghazi airport to be evacuated.
“We have no problem with intelligence sharing or gathering, but our sovereignty is also key,” said Mr. Abushagour.
The attack has raised questions about the adequacy of security preparations at the two American compounds in Benghazi: the American mission, the main diplomatic facility where Mr. Stevens and another American diplomat died of smoke inhalation after an initial attack, and an annex a half-mile away that encompassed four buildings inside a low-walled compound.
From among these buildings, the C.I.A. personnel carried out their secret missions. The New York Times agreed to withhold locations and details of these operations at the request of Obama administration officials, who said that disclosing such information could jeopardize future sensitive government activities and put at risk American personnel working in dangerous settings.
In Benghazi, both compounds were temporary homes in a volatile city teeming with militants, and they were never intended to become permanent diplomatic missions with appropriate security features built into them.
Neither was heavily guarded, and the annex was never intended to be a “safe house,” as initial accounts suggested. Two of the mission’s guards — Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty, former members of the Navy SEALs — were killed just outside the villa’s front gate. A mortar round struck the roof of the building where the Americans had scrambled for cover.
The U.S. military's hush-hush robotic X-37B space plane is slated to blast off again next month, Air Force officials say.
The mission will test the robotic spacecraft's reusability and may eventually land on the Florida runway once used for NASA space shuttles.
The X-37B space plane's next mission — called Orbital Test Vehicle-3, or OTV-3, because it is the program's third-ever spaceflight — is scheduled to launch aboard an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) sometime in October.
"Preparations for launch at Cape Canaveral have begun," said Major Tracy Bunko at the Pentagon’s Air Force press desk. "We are on track to launch OTV-3 next month; however, the exact date remains subject to change based on range conditions, weather, etc."
It launched into orbit on April 22, 2010, and then landed on Dec. 3 of that year, zooming in on autopilot over the Pacific Ocean and gliding down onto a specially prepared runway at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
A different X-37B vehicle made a similar Vandenberg touchdown this past June 16, having stayed in orbit for 469 days on its OTV-2 mission.
The X-37B program is being run by the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. The two space planes — which are 29 feet (8.8 meters) long and 15 feet (4.5 m) wide, with a payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed — were built by Boeing Government Space Systems.
While they're sparing with details about the X-37B program, Air Force officials say the vehicles enable them to test out how new technologies perform in space.
“One of the most promising aspects of the X-37B is it enables us to examine a payload system or technology in the environment in which it will perform its mission and inspect them when we bring them back to Earth,” Bunko said. “Returning an experiment via the X-37B OTV enables detailed inspection and significantly better learning than can be achieved by remote telemetry alone.”
A new landing site?
While both previous X-37B missions touched down at Vandenberg, the Air Force is considering landing future flights at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, next door to the Cape Canaveral launch site.
In fact, the Air Force is currently conducting taxi and braking tests as part of an ongoing appraisal. The prospect of a returning the robotic space plane to the KSC landing strip — which was used by NASA's now-retired space shuttle fleet — is seen as a cost-saving measure.
"We are also considering consolidating landing, refurbishment and launch operations at KSC or CCAFS in an effort to save money," Bunko said.
Al ARABIYA NEWS : A spy device camouflaged as a rock exploded when it came into contact with Iranian troops near an underground nuclear enrichment plant, The Sunday Times reported this week.
Last month, Revolutionary Guards at the Fordo nuclear facility, near the northern city of Qom, came across the rock and attempted to move it, according to sources who spoke to the newspaper.
The guards, who had been on patrol to check terminals connecting data and telephone links to the site, reportedly witnessed the disguised spy device exploding when they came into contact with it.
Experts who surveyed the scene of the explosion, according to the newspaper, analyzed remnants of the device and found it had been able to intercept data from computers at the nuclear plant, where uranium is enriched.
News of the explosion was reportedly first kept secret by the Iranians. But last week, Fereydoun Abbasi the Iranian vice-president and the head of the nuclear energy agency, revealed that the power lines between Qom and the Fordo facility were blown-up in August.
The finding has sparked speculation over whether the spy device could have been a significant source of intelligence for Western countries, which has now been lost.
Israel believes Iran's nuclear program to be aimed at developing an atomic weapons capability that would menace its own existence, and its current status as the Middle East's sole, if undeclared, nuclear weapons power.
Iran insists its program is exclusively for peaceful, civilian ends, but it is locked in a deepening standoff with the U.N. nuclear watchdog and the U.N. Security Council over the issue.
The existence of the site was unknown until it was uncovered three years ago in 2009, according to The Sunday Times, which added that the nuclear plant has been under surveillance by American, British and Israeli intelligence agencies.
It is believed that there are up to 3,000 centrifuges which are pieces of equipment used to separate substances of different densities and rotates at high speed that are hidden under 260ft of rock.
There are reports that claim the explosion was planned to cut the power supply to the plant and damage the centrifuges, however, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who visited the site the day after the explosion occurred did not state that there was any damage or disruption to the plant in their reports.
