This is exactly the kind of headline that would appear 20 minutes into a B-rate sci-fi movie.
As we approach Act II, an intrepid young journalist rushes to the hospital to find out what’s really going on… But wait, who is in the black car trailing her?
I am inclined to believe that they had clearly encountered the protomolecule, and – of course – the government is now trying to cover it up. Because, you know, too prevent another Eros.
Only one astronaut "experienced a medical issue." The other crew members were also evaluated -- and soon released -- "out of an abundance of caution." (Only one spent the night in the hospital.)
Some people seem to deal with long-term zero-G better than others. The cosmonaut who spent the longest continuous time in space was Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days in zero G in the early 1990s, came back fine, had a good career after returning, and recently died at age 80.
We already know that low-gravity causes all kinds of bone and muscle weakness and even messes with eyesight in a dramatic manner.
The scary part is while the bones/muscles can be healed over time, the eyesight problems persist and appear to be irreversible.
They have to solve this before trips to Mars will be possible, unless they are going to simulate gravity by constantly (slowly) accelerating half-way there and then slowly decelerating. It's technically plausible but a million other little problems have to be solved too. Won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive right now.
A constant-acceleration flight profile would also be a lot faster for interplanetary travel, but is impractical for any known or currently plausible reaction engine: the rocket equation strikes again. Ion or Hall-effect thrusters require only electrical power and so can more or less continuously accelerate, but they produce far too little thrust to provide meaningful pseudogravity.
Classically, the way to mitigate the medical problems of long microgravity exposure is by giving the spacecraft a rotating section, which produces enough centrifugal "down" to mostly satisfy human physiology. I understand the engineering problem involved there to be fairly severe in its own right, but most likely soluble given an established orbital manufacturing industry amply supplied by heavy lift from Earthside.
Another option might be to cable a pair of spacecraft together and spin them about their common barycenter, as I believe has been done with satellites in a few cases. Perhaps this will serve to improve the economics of Martian convict labor by increasing survival rates of transportees, while the English travel first class aboard luxury liners with spin gravity and nightly zero-G cabaret.
It's really interesting/odd that spin gravity stations have not been tested out in practice yet. Everyone just wants to do zero G experiments on their station and nothing else.
I think the dual spacecraft with a long cable is really the only practical option, since you get far too much coriolis for it to be bearable otherwise. Remains to be seen if they can make it work with two spacex starships though.
New scifi story idea: two space ships tethered to spin together, Mars-bound on a multi-month trajectory, both carrying crew[1], and one of them has the cliched space horror encounter with nasty alien life -- tell the story mostly from the point of view of the other crew. What to do?
[1]: Cargo can fly cheaper & slower, not worry about radiation exposure.
Well fusion would be too exotic to be developed in this century unless there is some unbelievable breakthrough but it is very realistic that all the micro-nuclear-reactor research & development being invested into by datacenter giants now might power a spaceship someday a decade down the road?
(the engine development would also have to advance obviously but not implausible)
It's been studied in the past (NERVA, et al.), and does seem to offer a specific-impulse advantage in the extremely high temperatures achievable by routing propellant through the reactor core. (So-called "closed-cycle" systems heat reaction mass outside a fairly conventional primary coolant loop; "open-cycle" doesn't have a coolant loop, but rather ejects hot coolant directly as reaction mass. There was also a nuclear-powered cruise missile design, I think called "Project Pluto," on this theme, although not directly related and so far as I know only studied in theory.)
It does of course still require reaction mass, but theoretical efficiency seems higher than other feasible systems; it wasn't really explored much in the old days due to the general post-Apollo builddown, and also due to the concerns of radioactive debris in case of mishap and radioactive exhaust if the system were used as a launch motor. (If not used to launch, it would need some orbital assembly and a lot of heavy lift, given not least the massive shielding required for remotely survivable crewed use.)
Another fission-based propulsion system, not relying on a steady-state reaction, was also studied under the name "Project Orion." I'll leave that one as a diversion for the interested reader, mainly because it seems unlikely anyone not already familiar would believe a word of any description I could give.
Astronauts have survived in the ISS for longer than it would take to make the trip to Mars. I don't think slightly damaging your eyesight would be a deal breaker if you're willing to go to Mars, a radioactive, unbreathable, freezing, near-vacuum and sterile desert.
NASA always manipulates news coverage… I recall the days 20 years ago whenever a politician got serious about cutting their budget, NASA would run a “water on the Moon!” story. If it comes out that long term space travel is going to cause brain damage (my guess here) their golden goose is cooked.
NASA is more than manned space travel with lots of unmanned missions to other planets and moons. If space travel causes brain damage, it's more like Elon will have problems.
I looked into manned Mars missions in a fit of enthusiasm 30 years or so, and I concluded that we couldn't do it because landing a human + life support on Mars requires deceleration technology we just don't have. Basically the speed of a Martian orbiter needs to be reduced to 0 or so to avoid splatting the human, but Mars' atmosphere is so thin that parachutes just don't provide the required break.
The moon has an average orbital velocity of 1km per sec (approx)
Mars is 24km per sec (approx) Terminal velocity is 600ms, on earth it's 54ms
So we are talking about something that is an order of magnitude more difficult. I think if retro rockets are to be used then far more fuel will be needed. But that means far more mass, which means more fuel - how much fuel would be needed to slow something like Starship for example?
Many of the landers we've already put on Mars are heavier & less tolerant of G forces than a human, so it's clearly not an insurmountable hard limit. They use a combination of parachutes, retro rockets & airbags usually. But you're right that the lander stage has to be a small fraction of the size of the interplanetary stage, & the economics aren't very good. Maybe you'd need to send several Starships to Mars orbit to refuel & support a single one landing &/or returning to Earth -- at least until refueling facilities exist on the surface, & assuming Starship is actually capable of this mission.
Could it be an initially-unnoticed chemical leak in the Crew Dragon? That could explain how it hospitalized four astronauts at once, and also why they're uncharacteristically afraid of media coverage. They were evasive in a similar way when Starliner was first having issues—they're scared of the politics, or of the lawyers.
edit to add: These spacecraft all use very toxic fuels, and this one has had issues with fuel leaks before [0]. I'm not sure how or if those could affect the crew. Maybe if there was contamination on an exterior surface, they could have been exposed on landing? IIRC it is or used to be standard procedure to take air samples before opening crewed spacecraft, for this reason.
edited again to add: I found it! It Apollo-Soyuz in 1975—the entire Apollo crew were poisoned by fuel when they opened the spacecraft, and were hospitalized with chemical pneumonitis [1,2].
- (wiki) "The only serious problem was during reentry and splashdown of the Apollo craft, during which the crew were accidentally exposed to toxic monomethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fumes, caused by unignited reaction control system (RCS) hypergolic propellants venting from the spacecraft and reentering a cabin air intake. The RCS was inadvertently left on during descent, and the toxic fumes were sucked into the spacecraft as it drew in outside air. Brand briefly lost consciousness, while Stafford retrieved emergency oxygen masks, put one on Brand, and gave one to Slayton. The three astronauts were hospitalized for two weeks in Honolulu, Hawaii.[22] Brand took responsibility for the mishap; because of high noise levels in the cabin during reentry, he believed he was unable to hear Stafford call off one item of the reentry checklist, the closure of two switches which would have automatically shut off the RCS and begun drogue parachute deployment. These procedures were manually performed later than usual, allowing the ingestion of the propellant fumes through the ventilation system.[23]"
I respectfully disagree. If you are taken to a hospital for medical evaluation, speakers would normally call that a medical issue, in plain English. None of this was routine or normal precaution—a point the article you linked emphasizes:
- "Normally, once medical personnel complete their preliminary assessment, crews are flown to shore on a helicopter, then board a NASA airplane for the flight back to Houston. Instead, the Crew-8 astronauts were taken to the hospital Friday morning."
The denotation is correct, but the connotation is wrong. Most people go by connotations, so I disagree with your statement that "speakers would normally call..."
Is there any evidence of that? Maybe it landed hard, maybe their launch hurt them and they couldn't get proper medical attention until they landed, maybe they were somehow unprepared for the longer stay in orbit. Maybe one of them barfed on the way down ...
Science tells us there is no value in making up possiblities, but that we must start from observation.
I believe the issue GP brings up is that merely inhaling a few breaths of this stuff is enough to cause damage. The crew may not have known beforehand that there was a leak or an issue.
I've sometimes gotten a whiff of a toxic fume, and my instant reaction is to hold my breath and leave the area. Not inhale a few breaths.
I'm sure the astronauts are fit enough they could hold their breath long enough to get the helmet on. After all, I expect they probably have a lot of training in getting the helmet on fast. There are many emergencies that would require this, such as rapid decompression, fire, smoke, etc.
I don't know if the astronauts do this or not, but if I was reentering, I'd put the helmet on anyway. It's only for a few minutes.
If it's excess methane, you won't sense it. This is why municipal gas has a smell agent added. The same cannot be done for space fuel.
If it's hydrazine, it is about as smelly as gasoline but ammonia, I think, but the toxic dose is below the smell threshold.
They’re still figuring out what happened. When they know, we’ll know. NASA does not have authority to unilaterally release medical information of its astronauts, so there’s nothing to say until the problem is identified.
- "NASA does not have authority to unilaterally release medical information of its astronauts"
Just to clarify—and I'm not denying her right to choose to do that—the person quoted in the article as citing "medical privacy" is one of the astronauts who was hospitalized.
You’re honestly telling me, an astronaut who’s been on nasa tv talking about bodily functions in space with school kids for 6 months, suddenly clams up and doesn’t want anyone to know they got hurt when the SpaceX seatbelt failed?
Sorry, but there's nothing about the NASA space program which has a "deal" to be transparent with the tax payer.
From being involved with high altitude spy planes and stealth planes during the Cold war through to thinking about the many satellites that are put into space that relates to national security and even the clandestine space plane, we have no idea what it's for...
There is simply no precedent to be upset about a lack of transparency from NASA. Some of that is national security. Some of that is to protect IP. Some of it is just because of the way governments work.
Factor in that actually it may relate to a private company's operational issue (SpaceX) there's even less reason for transparency.
Plot twist: STDs are endemic in the space station. Turns out low earth orbit is a powerful aphrodisiac, and space agencies have hid this from the general public for years. Now we know more about why billionaires are racing so urgently to get to Mars.
Andromeda strain on the one hand; gravity sucks on the other. There must be a psychological/neurological toll, like wearing prismatic glasses that invert your vision until the mind adjusts.
No, you're not missing anything. This whole thread is an embarrassment. Space is hard on the body and one of the astronauts wasn't feeling 100% when they came back.
The conflict of course is that the point of sending astronauts to space is to learn about the medical effects of the space environment on human bodies.
Basically they are participating in a very expensive publicly funded medical trial. So the goals of that need to be balanced against their privacy.
I’m not advocating that NASA should publish high resolution pictures of astronauts with puke stained shirts. But they could say “one of the astronauts experienced symptomps commonly associated with intense motion sickness which started after disembarking the vehicle” or “one of the astronauts had intense headaches” or whatever describes the situation.
If the astronauts are not okay with that level of transparency they should pay for their flight with their own money. Is my opinion.
It could be a medical condition entirely unrelated to their mission. If it's unrelated, the astronaut deserves their privacy. If spaceflight made their condition worse in some unexpected way, that should probably be made public. Maybe NASA is just waiting to confirm which option it is?
I feel a medical event that happened during a mission should be worth reporting even if it doesn't seem related at the time. There are so few humans that have spent significant time in space, less than 1000 that have went for any time all, and nearly all of them have been publicly funded research missions. Rather than hide data that seems innocuous at the time we should be gathering and sharing that until it's not such a rare research oriented project to travel to space. If you can't put your personal medical privacy interests aside then you shouldn't be the one signing up and being selected for such a public research service function.
At the same time I imagine this issue is something extremely mundane... which makes the lack of transparency and resulting media stir even more grating.
Unless they are hoping the public forgets to follow up. Sort of like when the president's press secretary says to a reporter when faced with a difficult question, "I'll have to get back to you on that."
I suppose you're right. As long as there ends up being some form of public discloser either through a journal or press conference in a timely manner (e.g. not 50 years from now) then humanity can still benefit.
Sci-fi is useful that way, extending a platform of base familiarity upon which the readers may then more quickly comprehend new advances and novel events. Love the stuff
My wild guess is seasickness. It's not supposed to happen to astronauts due to training and such, thus perhaps the unwillingness to say who. But tight quarters, seas were rough. You get the other astronauts checked out also just in case. I really don't have evidence for this though beyond wild speculation.
They all get space sick. Training helps with the temporary effects of g but no earthly training can prepare one's inner ear and digestive tract for 24/7 weightlessness. It happens to all of them but, conversely, they all get over it in time.
Decompression sickness requires breathing air at higher than atmospheric pressure, which you only need to do if the external pressure is high (i.e. when diving - otherwise your muscles would be unable to overcome the pressure difference and you wouldn't be able to breathe).
NASA: Space flight is still something we don’t fully understand, we’re finding things that we don’t expect sometimes. This was one of those times, and we’re still piecing things together on this and so to maintain medical privacy and to let our processes go forward in an orderly manner, this is all we’re going to say about that event at this time
Respectfully, I think it's reasonable that the privilege of being an astronaut — there are a thousand times more applicants than astronauts — comes with the tradeoff losing some of the privacy afforded to private citizens.
It costs NASA (and to be blunt about it, taxpayers) an extraordinary amount of money to put each astronaut in space. The fact is, there have been fewer than a thousand people in space in all of history. Each illness, sickness, even basic health vitals is in a sense invaluable taxpayer-funded science, and if you don't want your health to be in the public domain, there are a lot of other jobs available (or, now that we have SpaceX, you could take a private rather than government flight)
I'm not saying NASA should be publishing a livestream at the hospital, but I do think there's a reasonable expectation that NASA will release the health issues in a respectful but informative way to the public.
Someone posted a scrollable web page depiction of Musk's worth a while back. The entire NASA budget is insanely small by comparison. To imagine it, I would guess he cares more about what's in his omelet than getting more money from that budget.
Musk is frustrated with government inefficiency, especially with regulatory processes. He has complained multiple times about the approval process for launches and returns.
One government agency, he said, at one point required them to do a study that estimated the chances of a re-entering rocket body impacting a gray whale in the event that it splashed down hard -- personally I agree, that is kind of ridiculous.
>One government agency, he said, at one point required them to do a study that estimated the chances of a re-entering rocket body impacting a gray whale in the event that it splashed down hard -- personally I agree, that is kind of ridiculous.
If you read the relevant portions of SpaceX’s submission to the FAA (link and page numbers in the link above), the FAA comes across as totally reasonable. It sounds like they were just trying to make sure that SpaceX complied with the Endangered Species Act and other related laws. That’s hardly an example of agency overreach.
I think it may have been the NOAA(?) - sorry, I don't remember exactly which agency.
The FAA has required environmental studies, but it's not the only one that has. The answer you linked to didn't look into or take into account requirements from other agencies.
Without question, it was the FAA. Click the link and read the document.
“At the request of the FAA, SpaceX conducted a literature review of ESA-listed endangered and threatened species with known or presumed distributions in the study area that may be affected by the proposed March 2024 13 FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation Tiered Environmental Assessment for SpaceX Starship Indian Ocean Landings activities.”
It goes on to explicitly reference the (essentially zero) risk of impacting and killing and endangered-species-listed marine mammal on splashdown. It is the interaction described above.
The Endangered Species Act is not a requirement from another agency. It’s the law. Everyone has to follow it.
No, primarily Musk is frustrated with any requirement that he be accountable. Across the next four years his goals will be to reduce any accountability or transparency that applies to him and to maximize his profit.
No, I'm really not. Your comments are pretty far from being objective. I would suggest you reflect on your last sentence, but perhaps more introspectively.
there are lots of places taxoayer pay for which never see the light of day. i thimk ultimately though, this is not atall about that. they have very lenghty projects to get to root causes of issues. before such a project is fully completed and signed off on, they will not sah a word. before they have all the answers, you will get none. places of science -generally- work like this. no poitin bringing out incomplete information or uncertainties especially in siluch a place which faces a lot of public scruitiny.
Gizmodo used to be owned by Gawker which went bankrupt due to a lawsuit brought on because they didn't care about a famous person's privacy. So this seems par for the course.
Gawker went bankrupt, because a public figure who felt that he was outed failed to win a lawsuit against them, so bankrolled someone else's lawsuit, with many questions unanswered.
Public figure, because Courts have ruled that billionaires are public figures due to their "outsized influence on government and public policy".
Outed by Gawker, despite his social media at the time regularly featuring photos of him shirtless on gay cruises. Good for him, but "outed" was a bit of a stretch.
I have many issues, not with Hogan's lawsuit, but Thiel's bankrolling of it:
Hogan had already reached a tentative deal with Gawker, including a percentage of profits and partial ownership.
When Thiel's paying the bills, and some of attorneys are in his full-time employ, whose interests are actually primary in their mind, versus whose should be?
After his lawyers became involved, Hogan then asked for 5,000 times more, including damages that are pretty hard to account for:
Economic losses (financial loss, to be clear, NOT "emotional distreess", which they asked for separately) of $50M due to the damage of the videos release being publicized (because Gawker didn't release it, someone else did, and Hogan had settled with them for 1/1000th of what he wanted from Gawker)...
Hogan's career earnings were $15M, and his net worth at its highest was $30M, and at the time of the lawsuit, $8M. Wrestlemania would typically pay about $150K. Obviously Hogan has endorsements, but I would love to see how the fifty million number was arrived at... endorsements for hair products, and WWF reruns?
The reason I asked about lawyers and motives, because after all this was settled, Hogan/Thiel's lawyers told him to drop just one of the claims, specifically the one that would have had Gawker's insurance pay out...
... in other words, having had a deal for part ownership of the company, Hogan threw that away and asked for far more in questionable damages, and then when awarded them, then dropped the only claim that would actually have allowed him to see any real portion of those damages.
I wonder how much Thiel paid Hogan under the table. And I thought a tenet of law / justice was being able to face your accuser, not to have them launch/finance puppet lawsuits against you.
The reason Hogan won the lawsuit against Gawker is because they shared a video and story that was not newsworthy, and unfairly invaded a person's privacy.
Gawker fucked up, and had a history of fucking up in this exact way, without being held accountable. I think they absolutely deserved to get shut down.
Did Thiel take advantage of the situation for the purposes of revenge? Most likely! But at the end of the day, Gawker abused their position and paid the price.
I feel no regret that Gawker is gone. They were a piece of shit tabloid.
> The reason Hogan won the lawsuit against Gawker is because they shared a video and story that was not newsworthy, and unfairly invaded a person's privacy.
I have no issue with Hogan winning: "I have many issues, not with Hogan's lawsuit, but Thiel's bankrolling of it".
Is your issue with the people themselves, or is your issue people getting justice when they otherwise could not afford it? If your issue is with the people themselves, is it your opinion that justice should only be reserved for people that you like?
Seemed to me like Hogan both could afford it -and- had a possible result in his favor: part ownership of Gawker, revenue sharing, and damages.
Thiel's lawyers seem to have talked him out of it, and in the process, talked him into withdrawing the only claim that would have gotten him the damages he sought.
Either Hogan was paid "under the table" by Thiel, which goes to my point of "facing your accuser", because you're "throwing away" a positive result for someone else's idea of a positive result, or...
Thiel and his lawyers screwed over Hogan, promoting an outcome that was more what Thiel wanted than Hogan.
But for clarity: Fuck Gawker - the world is not poorer for their loss. I just think there's several ethical questions without answers in this instance.
Generally, when someone with money (Thiel) provides it to help someone with less money (Hogan) achieve a victory over those with more (Gawker), we celebrate it as a positive example of philanthropy.
[E] Put differently: if I were in Hogan's shoes, and was offered the choice between destroying a shitty publication that went out of their way to expose my personal life in an extremely embarrassing and entirely _not_ newsworthy way; or profiting off that same publication's continued existence? I would absolutely choose the former, because the publication's business model is the problem. Making money off the publication would be _morally_ wrong for me, once given the option of pursuing the destruction of the publication.
JD Vance is a protege of Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel his heavily involved behind the scenes in the Donald Trump campaign and presumably administration...
Which is how you have Hulk Hogan involved in Trump rallies.
It's likely they will publish their findings once they figure it out. Probably after a considerable time passes to help obfuscate the individuals involved.
Obfuscation isn't really possible. The identities of the crew are very public, and they all got hospitalized, so there isn't even room for guessing games about which one.
If deep sea divers need to come back to the surface slowly so their bodies can reacclimate to standard pressure, do astronauts undergo a similar reacclimation process as it pertains to gravity?
The issue with divers is that the extra pressure forces nitrogen bubbles deep into their tissues. If they then come up to surface pressure too quickly, the nitrogen bubbles will essentially "explode" out of their tissues and damage them.
I can see how it has nothing to do with nitrogen bubbles exploding. But why are you so quick to dismiss the concept? If gravity affects how liquids flow, bone density, and various aspects of human physiology, it stands to reason that a sudden return to earth's gravity could cause internal issues. No?
a) confessing that earth is flat after landing.
b) confessing that they landed of different version of Earth they originally departed from
c) suggesting that whole time they were in simulation and spacex is fancy alien vr tech
d) a new kind of virus affecting gravity particle / waves borked physics in thir legs and they can't walk normally
They were 8 months in space close to 0G and they just returned to our normal gravity environment. Just think for a moment how hard that is on the human body.
I would expect them to go to the hospital right away
Suni Williams who is still in orbit, has lost a lot of weight.
I wonder if it's related to that. Trying to find a commonality.
This quote was interesting, not sure exactly how true it is -
"Due to changes in metabolism, astronauts consume twice as many calories as an ordinary person: just to maintain their current weight, it takes about 4 thousand calories per day. Williams, doctors suggest, will need about 5 thousand calories."
Wow really? This could be a huge market for rich people who need a beach body within 3 months. Ozempic + a vacation in space could be a game changer for them.
It’s either because they don’t want us to freak out that we’re not gonna be able to escape the climate change hell on earth to go to Mars or that there is some reality behind all these new UFO disclosures.
We're not going to be able to escape climate change hell on earth by going to mars. You're not transferring 8 billion people to mars this century. The extremely optimistic scenario is that a small group of select rich people and explorers will be able to go to mars and live there self-sufficiently this century, but "we", as in 99.99% of humans, will have to deal with conditions on earth as they are.
Oh I 100% agree. The very optimistic scenario is that a colony on mars is formed with a few people who depend on regular shipments from earth. The realistic scenario is that a colony on mars is not made this century.
The extremely, wildly, super-optimistic, not gonna happen style scenario is that a few thousand people live there self-sufficiently; and my point is that, however unlikely such a scenario is, even that is nowhere close to enough, because the vast, vast majority of people would still have to deal with climate change. Moving to mars is not, and has never been, "a solution" on foreseeable time horizons.
That is the impression I got, but upon re-reading your comment + context I see that I misjudged.
..However, what it looks like you said is that you think NASA wants the public to believe that going to mars is a solution to climate change? Am I reading that right? If so, what makes you say that? If this was SpaceX I might've agreed, but a lot of NASA's resources are spent monitoring the climate on earth to help us tackle climate change, and I can't recall any communication from NASA about how going to mars is a near-term solution to climate change.
Why would anyone want to go to Mars? Are people now so hysterical that they honestly believe Earth after climate change would be less habitable than Mars, a desert planet with no air?
I don't know. Certain people have this idea that we have mars as a "back-up planet" if things get too bad on earth. Musk has been saying that for example. I think Musk says it to generate hype for his ventures, but I think others believe it because it's comforting to believe that no matter how bad things get here, we have an alternative.
The reality is of course that, at least for the foreseeable future, certainly for the duration of the lives of everyone alive today, there is no back-up planet. And honestly, given how climate change is progressing, that's scary.
There is no singular "the position", there are multiple people with different positions. Some just want to see humanity become a multi-planetary species this millennium, which is a perfectly sensible goal. Others imagine going to mars as a solution to climate change.
Unless you ship all the fuel you need to have on Mars while you are there and to get back (expensive), you'd need some technology to capture CO2 from the Martian atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen (from electrolysis) to make methane. But once you have that capture technology working there, it doesn't seem like there would be a problem with running that technology on Earth. If it were possible to capture CO2 directly from the air (DAC), you'd be cutting down the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that is only there because we burn fossile fuels.
There's lots of simpler explanations. Like maybe one of them had a "gastrointestinal event" during the landing, potentially exposing the others to something infectious.
This is delusional. Elon's "whole deal" is not that people will leave Earth en masse to escape climate change. That is a delusional interpretation of what he says
As we approach Act II, an intrepid young journalist rushes to the hospital to find out what’s really going on… But wait, who is in the black car trailing her?
reply