Mar 2002

Hot off the press is the news that China has launched the third of its Shenzhou series of space capsules on top of one of their latest, massive CZ-2F rockets. The launch on the 25^th March was monitored by tracking ships scattered about the globe, and seems to have gone well. The item of cargo that is getting all the attention is a dummy astronaut, all rigged up to measure the stresses of take off and landing. Obviously they're trying the capsule out for size for a manned flight, and are likely to send the first man or woman up some time early next year. Their press reports suggest that this craft is kitted out as if it were going to be a real manned launch, which is basically what you would do if you were planning on launching a real person next.

Previous flights have carried small, live animals and have orbited the Earth for a while. Their second attempt came down after a week, but not much was said about the landing leading some people to suspect that it didn't come down exactly as planned. Future space flights will undoubtedly be manned, and China's current aim is to put a man on the moon. However, unlike America, I doubt that they will be satisfied with leaving it at that.

Bold As Bass

Now it's not often that I mention pop artists, other than in the middle of a stream of expletives when the neighbours play the radio too loud, but N-Sync's Lance Bass does get an honourable mention. He has recently flown out to Russia for a medical exam, with a view to hitching himself a ride on a rocket to the International Space Station. He hopes to fly some time near the end of this year, but South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth will probably beat him to it this April.

The price of the tickets is currently US$20 million - to be paid by an American film company - but I can't help wondering how much I'd have to pay for them to not bring him down...

NASA Plays Secret Squirrel

Following the current trend of paranoia, NASA is now not announcing the launch time of the shuttle Atlantis (seen here on the left) until a few hours prior to the event. As is typical with so much American window-dressing of this nature, the scheduled launch time has in fact been announced some months ago, and is easily calculated with a bit of mental arithmetic. For those terrorists slow on the uptake, it'll probably go up on its 25^th flight at about 2214hrs UT on the 4^th April.

So what's it doing? Delivering a truss to the International Space Station. No, the astronauts have not managed to herniate themselves in zero-g, this is a big latticework of tubes that will hold some of the life support and power systems that the ISS will require as it continues to grow.

The Cost Of Going Up Is Coming Down

No, not news on my bribery attempts. There is getting to be quite a bit of interest in space tourism, but 20 US megabucks is a bit steep. Enter the Myasishchev Design Bureau. These are the guys who designed the Russian space shuttle, Buran. They've designed a much smaller - but familiar-looking - craft called the Cosmopolis XXI or C-21 that is designed to take short hops into space, up to 100km or so. So far it only exists as a full-size mock-up but that'll change. It is taken up to about 20km by another one of their creations, the M-55X. If you look at the image on the left (courtesy of Space Adventures Ltd. who are the front agency for the exercise) you can see the M-55X in the background. It is the unsung hero of the piece, packing a liquid-fuelled rocket engine in an enormous internal bay originally intended to hold scientific research equipment.

It takes off and climbs up to 20km with the C-21 on its back and then lights its own rockets. Once the M-55X rocket engines have run out, it drops away from under the C-21 and retreats to a safe distance. The C-21's own rocket then lights up and burns for a while. Far above the atmosphere, the C-21 will coast upwards to its maximum height of 100km giving 5 minutes of zero-g, before plunging down to Earth in a fiery re-entry where the lucky occupants are given a slap-up meal and their astronaut's wings. I'm told it'll be a rougher re-entry than coming down from orbit, but no fear: the occupants will have had several days of intensive training. This is included in the US$98,000 dollar price tag, and includes such goodies as centrifuge training and a flight in a zero-g training aircraft, aka "The Vomit Comet". Sounds like a whole adventure in itself.

Mars Didn't Wet Itself

The news from Mars is not very optimistic with regards to finding Martians. It now turns out that there are alternative explanations for the surface features of Mars that previously were explained away by being carved by water.

As if that weren't enough Andrea Koziol, associate professor of geology at the University of Dayton, has been looking at the Martian meteorite (called ALH001) that some claimed to have found signs of past life in. Koziol managed to reproduce the features by warming a sample of inert material that was itself cooked up in the lab. While this doesn't actually mean that there hasn't been life on Mars, it does mean that there is another explanation. The only way we'll find out for sure is when we get to Mars and start grubbing around under the rocks, and have a good old-fashioned hunt for fossils in some of those amazing Martian canyons. Now that would be a field trip and a half.

This edition is also on the web, just point your web browser to http://olliver.family.gen.nz.   vik@olliver.family.gen.nz

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

- Douglas Adams.
Back to the Launchpad main page http://olliver.family.gen.nz/launchpad