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.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
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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.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
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