President Joe Biden warned that the Category 5 storm could be the worst natural disaster to hit the state in a century.

As the second huge hurricane in as many weeks rumbled toward Florida’s west coast, people raced to board up homes and flee.

“It’s a matter of life and death, and that’s not hyperbole,” Biden said from the White House on Tuesday, urging those under orders to leave to “evacuate now, now, now”.

By Wednesday morning Milton was located about 485km southwest of Tampa, generating maximum sustained winds of 260kph, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

“Milton remains a catastrophic Category 5 Hurricane,” said the NHC, forecasting the storm to make landfall on the Florida Gulf coast on Wednesday night.

It “is expected to remain an extremely dangerous major hurricane when it reaches the west-central coast of Florida”, it said.

Tampa’s mayor, Jane Castor, warned residents on CNN: “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”

At a news conference, Governor Ron DeSantis ticked off town after town in danger.

“Basically the entire peninsula portion of Florida is under some type of either a watch or a warning,” he said.

Airlines put on extra flights out of Tampa, Orlando, Fort Myers and Sarasota, as highways clogged up with escaping traffic and petrol stations sold out of fuel.

Hurricane expert Michael Lowry warned that in the Tampa area, home to about three million people, Milton’s storm surge “could double the storm surge levels observed two weeks ago during Helene”, which brought massive flooding.

Biden postponed a major trip to Germany and Angola to oversee the federal response. Storm relief efforts have emerged as a political battleground ahead of the 5 November presidential election.

Donald Trump has tapped into frustration about the emergency response after Hurricane Helene and fuelled it with disinformation, falsely claiming that disaster money had been spent instead on migrants.

Biden slammed Trump’s comments as “un-American”, while Vice-president Kamala Harris warned about the danger that misinformation posed to the federal response.

“It’s crude. Have you no empathy, man, for the suffering of other people? Have you no sense of purpose if you purport to be a leader?” she said, challenging Trump directly during an interview with late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert.

In a scene of frantic preparation repeated all over Florida, dozens of cars lined up at a sports facility in Tampa to pick up sandbags to protect their homes from flooding.

John Gomez, 75, ignored official advice and travelled all the way from Chicago to try to save a second house he has in Florida.

“I think it’s better to be here in case something happens,” Gomez said while waiting in line.

But Katie, in her 30s, heeded the call to evacuate and arrived in Orlando with her five-year-old son and dog from St Petersburg, a coastal city where Hurricane Helene had brought about a metre of floodwater into her bayside home two weeks ago.

Normally she would ride out the storm at a friend’s elevated apartment, she said, “but I’m not taking any chances this time around.”

Scientists say global warming has a role in intense storms as warmer ocean surfaces release more water vapour, providing additional energy for storms, which exacerbates their winds.

A report by the World Weather Attribution group published on Wednesday said Hurricane Helene’s torrential rain and powerful winds were made about 10% more intense because of climate change.

Storms of Helene’s magnitude were formerly anticipated once every 130 years, but now the probability is closer to once every 53 years, on average.

On the ground, communities hit by deadly Hurricane Helene — which slammed Florida late last month — have rushed to remove debris that could become dangerous projectiles as Milton approaches.

In Mexico’s Yucatan state, strong winds toppled trees and pylons, while heavy rain caused flooding, but the peninsula avoided major damage or casualties as the storm barrelled offshore.

Across the southeastern US, emergency workers are still struggling to provide relief after Helene, which killed at least 230 people.

It hit the Florida coastline on 26 September as a major Category 4 hurricane, causing flooding in remote inland towns in states farther north, including North Carolina and Tennessee.

Helene was the deadliest natural disaster to hit the US mainland since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, with the death toll still rising. — AFP

A brand new rocket, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:18 am (0718 GMT) for its maiden voyage, carrying Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lunar Lander. 

Mission control staff cheered and applauded as the lander separated from the rocket around 48 minutes later without problems — a key milestone for the private company.

ULA’s president and CEO Tony Bruno praised the launch on NASA’s livestream.

“I am so thrilled,” he said. “This has been years of hard work.

“So far this has been an absolutely beautiful mission back to the Moon.”

Eric Monda, ULA’s strategic planning director, described the launch as “spot on.”

“It was so cool. I ran outside to watch,” he said.

If all goes to plan, Peregrine will touch down on a mid-latitude region of the Moon called Sinus Viscositatis, or Bay of Stickiness, on February 23.

Until now, a soft landing on Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor has only been accomplished by a handful of national space agencies: the Soviet Union was first, in 1966, followed by the United States, which is still the only country to put people on the Moon. 

China has successfully landed three times over the past decade, while India was the most recent to achieve the feat on its second attempt, last year.

Now, the United States is turning to the commercial sector to stimulate a broader lunar economy and ship its own hardware at a fraction of the cost, under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

“Leading America back to the surface of the Moon for the first time since Apollo is a momentous honor,” Astrobotic’s CEO John Thornton had said ahead of the launch.

A challenging task 

NASA paid Astrobotic more than $100 million for the task, while another contracted company, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is looking to launch in February and land near the Moon’s south pole.

“We think that it’s going to allow… more cost effective and more rapidly accomplished trips to the lunar surface to prepare for Artemis,” said Joel Kearns, the US space agency’s deputy associate administrator for exploration.

Artemis is the NASA-led program to return astronauts to the Moon later this decade, in preparation for future missions to Mars.

Controlled touchdown on the Moon is a challenging undertaking, with roughly half of all attempts failing. 

In the absence of an atmosphere that would allow the use of parachutes, a spacecraft must navigate treacherous terrain using only its thrusters to slow descent.

Private missions by Israel and Japan, as well as a recent attempt by the Russian space agency, have all ended in failure — though the Japanese Space Agency is targeting mid-January for the touchdown of its SLIM lander launched last September.

This the first launch for ULA’s Vulcan rocket, although the company claims a 100 percent success rate in more than 150 prior launches.

ULA’s new rocket is planned to have reusable first stage booster engines, which the company, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, expects will help save costs.

Science instruments, human remains

On board Peregrine is a suite of scientific instruments that will probe radiation and surface composition, helping to pave the way for the return of astronauts.

But it also contains more colorful cargo, including a shoebox-sized rover built by Carnegie Mellon University, a physical Bitcoin and, somewhat controversially, cremated remains and DNA, including those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, legendary sci-fi author and scientist Arthur C. Clarke and a dog.

The Navajo Nation, America’s largest Indigenous tribe, has objected to sending human remains, calling it a desecration of a sacred space. Though they were granted a last-ditch meeting with White House, NASA and other officials, their objections failed to remove the cargo.

The Vulcan rocket’s upper stage, which will circle the Sun after it deploys the lander, is meanwhile carrying more late cast members of Star Trek, as well as hair samples of presidents George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.  

© Agence France-Presse