the secret planning for president biden s very dangerous travel to kyiv and the direct messaging he s sending to vladimir putin as the russian leader is expected to unleash a major new military offensive in the weeks ahead. key white house official john kirby joins us this hour. welcome to our viewers here in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer, and this is a situation room special report. president biden is in poland this hour after personally delivering a strong message of support to the people of war-torn ukraine. his high-stakes, high-risk trip coming at a pivotal moment in the fight against russia s unprovoked invasion. cnn s chief white house correspondent phil mattingly is traveling with the president. good morning, mr. president. reporter: for president biden, a dramatic moment months in the making. one year later, kyiv stands, and ukraine stands. democracy stands. reporter: to mark the resilience of a nation and u.s. support after mor
-my wife, laurel, was on the shuttle. she was a scientist primarily involved with life sciences. one day during the mission, i was reviewing the notes, and then here s this foam issue. during launch, a large piece of foam had come off the external tank and impacted the left wing. me and my colleague had this discussion of, hey, you can use a family conference to talk to laurel and find out what she knew. -oh! -you got to remember the hat you re wearing is your flight-surgeon hat, not your family hat. it would have broken protocol for me to bring up an issue to a crew member, even though it s my wife. -i remember a certain sense of relief like, it s almost over. she s almost back. -i didn t talk to laurel about the foam issue. that conference was for iain and laurel, and i was a bystander. -i knew she was going to come back. you know, i never had a question in my mind. -given the fact that you may have lost a little bit of tile during lift-off, i m wondering
Confidence on where it lands. If you see fins on the nose of any of these things, they may have some sort of guided Precision System inside and thats even scarier. Question, two technical question. I love youre here to help us cover this. The distance, the range, the accuracy is one set of matters. Perhaps the most important sensitivity matters is what they can put on that missile. Whether or not they can bring it in successfully, right. You have the rv, the reentry vehicle. That May 14th Launch did Successfully Reenter the atmosphere. We dont know if they miniaturizeed a Nuclear War Head. We dont know if its small enough to put on the cone on the tip of a missile. Talk to some folks in the pentagon they think maybe, perhaps. Others in the general assessment within the Intelligence Community they havent achieved that yet. Heres the issue, the minute
want to make sure that the United States and south korea and our allies arent threatening the ability of this dynasty to continue leading
my primary thing is getting the spacecraft up on to orbit and getting it back down safely. that morning, the atmosphere it was upbeat. there s no issues. we work with the crew to go through system checkouts. -we got all of our systems ready, all the sensors ready, and we prepared for the de-orbit preparation, which is you convert the space shuttle from a spacecraft to a re-entry vehicle. everything was proceeding normally that day. -the big thing that i remember really paying attention to shortly before landing was the weather. -flight controllers are currently monitoring the fog that has limited visibility but is dissipating. -because, obviously, it is just critical to have decent visibility,