Russia launches three astronauts to ISS
Russia this morning successfully launched a new crew to ISS, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
With this launch there are now nineteen humans in orbit, a new record. This includes the three Chinese astronauts on China’s Tiangong-3 space station, the four astronauts on the private Polaris Dawn mission, the three astronauts on this Soyuz, and the nine astronauts on ISS (four from a Dragon launch, two from the Starliner launch, and three from a previous Soyuz launch).
The Soyuz capsule will dock with ISS this afternoon.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
89 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 104 to 58, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 89 to 73.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Russia this morning successfully launched a new crew to ISS, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
With this launch there are now nineteen humans in orbit, a new record. This includes the three Chinese astronauts on China’s Tiangong-3 space station, the four astronauts on the private Polaris Dawn mission, the three astronauts on this Soyuz, and the nine astronauts on ISS (four from a Dragon launch, two from the Starliner launch, and three from a previous Soyuz launch).
The Soyuz capsule will dock with ISS this afternoon.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
89 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 104 to 58, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 89 to 73.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Are the Russians no longer called Cosmonauts?
Brian: I stopped using the term “cosmonauts” about two decades ago, when everyone was launching to ISS as an international partnership. “Astronaut” is the English term. If I was writing in Russian then the other term would be appropriate.
I am also tending to use the term “astronaut” less and less, because it implies something unique and special about the person flying that is becoming less unique or special as commercial space steadily takes over future exploration. Consider: Is a space tourist an astronaut? If not, why not? And if not why are others deserving of the special title? What meaning does it have?
Right now all it means is that the person flew in space.
Isn’t is interesting that the Russians had put a few tourists on the ISS without anyone questioning the meaning of the word “astronaut,” but as soon as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic were about to put tourists into suborbital space, so many people were concerned that the word would suddenly be watered down.
The definition does not even mean someone who went into space but: “a person who is trained to travel in a spacecraft.” Training, not location, is the criterion. Are Blue Origin’s and Virgin Galactic’s passengers trained to travel in a spacecraft?
It seems to have originated in the 1920s from “astro-,” on the pattern of aeronaut (a traveler in a hot-air balloon, airship, or other flying craft) and aquanaut (a person who swims underwater using an aqualung), two terms that seem to not be in the popular lexicon. It is difficult to use these two terms to determine whether a tourist in space is still an astronaut, because we do not call professional fliers aeronauts, so we don’t know whether the tourist or passenger is one, too, and we don’t call professional divers auqanauts, so we don’t know whether the pleasure diver is one. The definitions do not distinguish between those performing these activities for vocation or avocation.
As I like to note, so far all the travelers in SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft have done research while on orbit. In my mind, they are people who have worked in space and do not fall under the definition of tourist (a person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure). They may be spending time enjoying the trip, but many of us have taken in the sights while on travel for work, so this does not make them tourists any more than our business travel was tourism. If we were to lose astronaut status just for looking out the window, then only those in spacecraft without windows (such as Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight) would remain astronauts.
Also well known in the American lexicon is cosmonaut. Over the years I have collected a number of equivalent words from other countries or languages:
Astronaut nouns:
— China: Yuhangyuan (official Chinese word, 航天员, “space navigating personnel”), and
— China: taikonaut (English-speaking news organizations’ word)
— Congo: Galaxionautes ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGEFquEjqlM )
— France: spationaut (French spelling: spationaute)
— India: vyomanaut (coined from the Sanskrit word for space)
— Malay: angkasawan