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China's First Spacewalk
Smivs writes "The BBC reports that China will launch its third manned space mission in late September, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
The Shenzhou VII flight will feature
China's first-ever space walk, which will be broadcast live with cameras inside and outside the spacecraft.
For the spacewalk, two crew members will go into the spacecraft's vacuum module. One yuhangyuan (astronaut) will carry out the spacewalk; the other is there to monitor the activity and assist in case of an emergency.
Two types of spacesuits — one made in China, the other from Russia — will be carried up on the flight.
It is unclear why China has opted for two different types of spacesuit.
Spaceflight analyst Dr Morris Jones commented that China might want to test the suits against each other. Alternatively, he said, it might not be ready or willing to fly a mission exclusively with its own suits."
Hmm..Well, while I wish the Chinese astronauts the best of luck and hope they get back safely, I doubt that the film is going to be "Live" More likely? A nice safe delay of, oh...a hour to make sure that nothing gets shown that's not supposed to be shown.
China has too much media control to trust something as unpredictable as live TV, especially in a situation where so many things could go wrong.
On that note, good luck! Maybe this'll get us off our asses and back up into space! A little competition never hurt nobody.
All nine of you are totally busted for pretending you read the article, since the link doesn't work.
A permanent moonbase is like the war in Iraq: Sure, some profit off it but essentially you are throwing money away.
Yeah, just like the war in Iraq, except without the part about, you know, killing people.
The US is still a very rich country (not, granted, as rich relative to the rest of the world as we were in the 1960s, but still) and we can afford to do things that don't show an immediate profit. Speaking as someone who has seen war up close and personal -- and whose father was one of the people who made the moon landings happen -- I'd much rather have us spending money on space exploration than on wars of aggression.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.