Wild Weather Hits Australia: Woman Dead, 120,000 without Power 

Anglers retreat from a pier on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne on September 2, 2024, as winds of more than 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour lash the region, leaving about 150,000 people without power. (AFP)
Anglers retreat from a pier on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne on September 2, 2024, as winds of more than 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour lash the region, leaving about 150,000 people without power. (AFP)
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Wild Weather Hits Australia: Woman Dead, 120,000 without Power 

Anglers retreat from a pier on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne on September 2, 2024, as winds of more than 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour lash the region, leaving about 150,000 people without power. (AFP)
Anglers retreat from a pier on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne on September 2, 2024, as winds of more than 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour lash the region, leaving about 150,000 people without power. (AFP)

A woman has died and more than 120,000 were left without power after high winds and heavy rain hit southern Australia, authorities said on Monday.

There was widespread damage in the states of Victoria and Tasmania, while a 63-year-old woman was killed after a tree fell on a cabin at a holiday park on the border between Victoria and New South Wales, emergency services said.

"It's a sad and tragic set of circumstances for the woman's family and my thoughts and sympathy go out to her and the emergency services who responded to that incident," Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan told a news conference.

Victoria's State Emergency Services received over 2,800 call outs overnight, mostly for fallen trees and building damage, she added.

At least 121,000 remained without power on Monday, Allan said, down from as many as 180,000 in the early hours of the morning.

Weather warnings remain in place for much of the state's southeast coast, as winds of almost 150 km per hour (93 mph) lashed the state overnight.

A Victoria state government advisory on Monday told people to avoid coastal areas because of dangerous waves, unstable land in cliff areas, and flooding in low-lying areas. The southern island state of Tasmania has also been hit by wild weather, with thousands left without power on Sunday.

"We've seen another wild night of weather across the state with extensive destruction," Mick Lowe, executive director of Tasmania's State Emergency Services, told a news conference on Monday.

Extreme weather events are common for many Australians.

The storms across the south of the country follow days of unseasonably high winter temperatures of almost 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in New South Wales' capital Sydney.



SpaceX-Polaris Crew Exits Capsule for First Private Spacewalk

Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, commander Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, crew members of Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, attend a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, US August 19, 2024. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, commander Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, crew members of Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, attend a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, US August 19, 2024. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
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SpaceX-Polaris Crew Exits Capsule for First Private Spacewalk

Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, commander Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, crew members of Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, attend a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, US August 19, 2024. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, commander Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, crew members of Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, attend a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, US August 19, 2024. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights

A crew of four aboard a SpaceX capsule embarked on the world's first private spacewalk on Thursday, as an astronaut eased out of the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a tether into the vacuum of space, hundreds of miles from Earth.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman, 41, exited first about 6:52 a.m. ET (1052 GMT). After he returned a few minutes later, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, 30, was scheduled to take her turn in space, all their maneuvers streaming live on the company's website, Reuters reported.

"Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world," Isaacman said after emerging from the spacecraft, the planet glittering in half shadow below him.

Before the spacewalk began, the capsule was completely depressurized, with the whole crew relying on their slim, SpaceX-developed spacesuits for oxygen, provided via an umbilical connection to Crew Dragon.

The spacewalk was scheduled to last only about 30 minutes, but the procedures to prepare for it and to finish it safely last about two hours. It was meant to test the new spacesuit designs and procedures for the capsule, among other things.

Isaacman, Gillis, Scott Poteet, 50, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, 38, had been orbiting Earth aboard Crew Dragon since Tuesday's pre-dawn launch from Florida of the Polaris Dawn mission. Menon and Poteet remained inside the spacecraft during the spacewalk.

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It is the Elon Musk-led company's latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight.

Isaacman, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4 (FOUR.N), opens new tab, is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021.

He has declined to say how much he is paying, but the missions are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, based on Crew Dragon's price of roughly $55 million a seat for other flights.

-FARTHEST SINCE APOLLO

Throughout Wednesday, the craft circled Earth at least six times in an oval orbit as shallow as 190 km (118 miles) and stretching out as far as 1,400 km (870 miles), the farthest in space that humans have traveled since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.

The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft then began to lower its orbit into a peak 700-km (435-mile) position and adjust cabin pressure to ready for the spacewalk, formally called Extravehicular Activity (EVA), the Polaris program said on social media on Wednesday.

"The crew also spent a few hours demonstrating the suit’s pressurized mobility, verifying positions and accessibility in microgravity along with preparing the cabin for the EVA," it said.

Only government astronauts with several years of training have done spacewalks in the past.

There have been roughly 270 on the International Space Station (ISS) since it was set up in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing's Tiangong space station.

The Polaris crew has spent 2-1/2 years training with SpaceX mission simulations and "experiential learning" in challenging, uncomfortable environments, said Poteet.

A record 19 astronauts are now in orbit, after Russia's Soyuz MS-26 mission ferried two cosmonauts and a US astronaut to the International Space Station on Wednesday, taking its headcount to 12.

Three Chinese astronauts are aboard the Tiangong space station.

The first US spacewalk in 1965, aboard a Gemini capsule, used a similar procedure to the one planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurized, the hatch opened, and a spacesuited astronaut ventured outside on a tether.

Since 2001, Crew Dragon, the only US vehicle capable of reliably putting humans in orbit and returning them to Earth, has flown more than a dozen astronaut missions, mainly for NASA.

The agency seeded development of the capsule under a program meant to establish commercial, privately-built US vehicles capable of ferrying astronauts with the ISS.

Also developed under that program was Boeing's Starliner capsule, but it is farther behind.

Starliner launched its first astronauts to the ISS in June in a troubled test mission that ended this month with the capsule returning empty, leaving its crew on the space station for a Crew Dragon capsule to fetch next year.