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These men are from Moon
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic


On May 25, 1961 John F. Kennedy launched what he admitted was “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked” a manned expedition to the Moon.

Between 1968 and 1972, nine American spacecraft would go on that great adventure, most famously Apollo 11, crewed by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.

The men of the Apollo programme who have been interviewed for a remarkable documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon remain the only human beings to have visited another world.

Even today, as America and China eye a return trip, their achievement remains utterly breathtaking.

Yet Apollo almost never got off the ground. In 1967, during the build-up to the launch of Apollo 1, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were testing the command module that sat atop the spacecraft.

Just after 6.30pm, a voltage flicker was recorded, caused by a spark in the highly pressurised, pure oxygen environment.

Chaffee yelled: “We’ve got a bad fire! Let’s get out! We’re burning up! We’re on fire! Get us out of here!” Witnesses saw White on the television monitors, reaching for the hatch release handle.

Seconds later, the transmission ended abruptly with a scream. All three died.

“We’re burying our guys at Arlington and I wasn’t sure if we were burying the entire Apollo programme,” recalls Gene Cernan, who would be the last man to walk on the Moon.

But by December 1968, the Saturn V rocket was ready to carry a crew for the first time in an orbit around the Earth.

However, Nasa heard from the CIA that the Russians were preparing to send a manned spacecraft around the Moon to upstage them.

So the flight plan was hurriedly changed. “It was a bold move,” says Jim Lovell, who would later command Apollo 13. “It had some risks to it. But it was a time when we made bold moves.”

His team was mesmerised by their lunar encounter. “We were just 60 miles above the craters and we were like three schoolkids looking through the candy store window.

"We took photographs as much as we could and, of course, we took the photograph of the famous Earthrise around the Moon.”

On Christmas Eve, as they emerged from the Moon’s shadow, the astronauts began to read from the Book of Genesis, which they had stored on fireproof paper in their flight manual.

Ready to land

After two further test flights, Nasa felt ready to attempt the first landing in July 1969.

Aldrin felt a pang of sympathy for Collins, who would have to remain in the command module as he and Armstrong — described by Charlie Duke of Apollo 16 as “the coolest under pressure of anyone that I had ever had the privilege of flying with” — descended.

“I discovered later that I was described as the loneliest man ever in the universe ... ,” Collins says, “which really is a lot of baloney. I had Mission Control yakking in my ear half the time. Everything was going well with the command module, I had my happy little home, I had the bright lights on and everything was fine.”

The men knew they were going to make history. “I don’t think anybody slept too well the night before,” Aldrin says. “You’re just wondering whether you can get enough rest for what you need to possibly do.”

But once the mission was under way, there was no time to dwell on its wider significance.

Collins describes the frenetic initial stages: “You go up into Earth orbit and go around the Earth once. That’s a busy time because you want to make sure that everything on board is working properly before you set sail for the Moon.

"Then you get word that you’re going for TLI [trans-lunar injection], and that means you can ignite the motor and head off to the Moon. You do, you go, and that’s it.”

As he tells it, there was no fear, but lot of worry. “You’re not sure all these things are going to work properly ... a lot of them in a very fragile daisy chain. You don’t want any of those links to break, because downstream from that broken link they are all useless — so yes, you are worried.”

Once in orbit around the Moon, he still felt a sense of foreboding. “When the Sun is shining on the surface at a very shallow angle, the craters cast long shadows and the Moon’s surface seems very inhospitable. Forbidding, almost.”

Watching from above as the lander descended, Collins sensed something more — there was a problem.

“It seemed like Neil was having a difficult time finding a suitable spot to put it down. I got a little worried then because they didn’t have a lot of extra fuel.”

The guidance system was carrying them into a boulder field, so Armstrong had to traverse the landscape rapidly. “Some of these boulders were the size of Volkswagens. It was a little iffy right there at the very end.”

The world held its breath, but four days, six hours, 45 minutes and 39 seconds into the flight, the lander reached the surface safely. “Stand by,” Mission Control said.

Armstrong said: “I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM [lunar module] foot pads are — only depressed about one to two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine-grained ... OK, I’m going to step off the LM now.”

Then, that famous phrase: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”

More pressing concerns

Aldrin’s response to reaching the lunar surface was altogether more down to earth.

“I decided to take that period of time … to take care of a bodily function ... so that I wouldn’t be troubled with having to do that later on. Everybody has their firsts on the Moon, and that one hasn’t been disputed by anybody.”

Collins was by now anxious about the next step: “I didn’t have any great feeling of ‘We’ve done it’ — I was a lot more worried about getting them up off the Moon than I was about getting them down … If something went wrong [with the motor on the lunar module] they were dead men: There was no other way for them to leave.”

Indeed, a speech had been prepared in case the module failed to lift off. Collins recalls the words: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.

"These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery, but they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”

But the launch from the lunar surface was flawless and Collins watched as the module returned to the mothership.

“Oh God, it’s beautiful ... you see the module, a little golden bug among the craters, and it gets slowly bigger and bigger…. Finally they got back into the command module and I grabbed Buzz by both ears and was going to kiss him on the forehead ....” Although he settled for a more manly greeting, there were few congratulations: “You don’t have time to sit around and reminisce, because you’ve got TEI [trans-Earth injection] coming up.”

There was one more critical point: during re-entry, when the command module roared back to Earth at up to 26,000 miles an hour.

“Your heat shield is on fire and its fragments are streaming out behind you. It’s like being inside a gigantic light bulb,” Collins says.

After the flight, the three went on a round-the-world trip. “Instead of saying ‘You Americans did it’, everywhere they said ‘We did it — we, humankind’,” Collins recalls.

“I’d never heard people in different countries use this word ‘we, we, we’ as emphatically… I thought that was a wonderful thing. Ephemeral, but wonderful.”

Directed by David Sington, In the Shadow of the Moon premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Audience Award.

June 28, 2008 | 2:17 AM Comments  0 comments
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First lady of headlines, beyond frontiers
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Christina Lamb is no ordinary reporter. The foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times and long-time friend of the late Benazir Bhutto has the honour of having been declared an “enemy of the state” by Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe.

For her work as a journalist she has won several prizes, including Foreign Correspondent of the Year on four occasions.

And that is not all. Lamb is also an author and has written five books. Her latest offering, Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands, is a look back at her reporting from distant and often exotic corners of the globe.

As a child, Lamb had not thought of going off to be a journalist. At her home, what the neighbours were doing generated greater interest than what was in the paper.

“The only newspaper we got was the Daily Mail, which was for my dad to follow horse racing and to do the crosswords,” she says.

It was at the library that she discovered Hemingway and she started to write. At that stage, though, she was more interested in being a novelist than a journalist.

Life, however, had its own way of planning things. She went to study chemistry at Oxford University but realised she hated it.

So she switched to philosophy, politics and economics and ended up joining, and later editing, the university paper, Cherwell.

Later she worked as an intern at the Financial Times. There she was once sent to attend a lunch of South Asian politicians.

One thing led to another and Lamb managed to land an interview with the young and exiled Benazir Bhutto. And so began their famous and long friendship.

Off to Pakistan

“Benazir had a huge influence on my life,” she admits. Sometime after they had met, Lamb began work for the Central News in Birmingham.

"One day when she came home, there lay on her mat a gold inscribed letter that was the invitation to Benazir’s wedding. “It was something out of the Arabian Nights,” she says.

So Lamb took all the holiday she could, packed her bags and flew off. “It was an amazing introduction to Pakistan,” she says, describing the wedding in Karachi.

“Every evening after the ceremony was finished we would have all these discussions late into the night about how to deal with martial law because Pakistan was under General Zia.”

The trip to Pakistan had such an impact on Lamb that on her return to England she resigned from her job at Central News, flew back to Pakistan and based herself in Peshawar.

Those were the days of the Soviet invasion and she used to cross the border into Afghanistan to report for papers back in the United Kingdom.

And that is how Lamb entered the world of foreign reporting. Since her early days in Peshawar, she has reported from Brazil, Iraq, Nigeria, Bolivia, Argentina, Zimbabwe, South Africa ... the list goes on.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Lamb, major world events unfold in the places she travels to. Not long after she had been in Pakistan, General Zia was killed.

When she went to India on holiday, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. When she was in Brazil, a huge story broke as its president became the first in the country to get impeached.

Her first trip to Zimbabwe was in 1994 for a holiday when it was a success story, Lamb says. During a long weekend in Morocco, there was a bombing in Casablanca.

“You do start to think after awhile to not go where I go,” she adds.

Lamb, who has written a book on Zimbabwe, says she is determined to keep reporting from the country despite the threats from the Mugabe regime.

“It is very important that we still keep going into the country and reporting on what’s happening,” she says.

She was in Zimbabwe before the recent controversial general elections and says she never sleeps easy when she is there.

“I stayed the last couple of nights at a lodge that belongs to a friend in Harare,” she says. “The first morning there, she said to me that she has had phone calls from the secret police asking if there are any foreigners staying. She gave me the back-door keys so I could make an escape if I needed to.”

Lamb has interviewed many famous and fascinating personalities, including the late Princess Diana. “She went to Angola for the land mine issue,” she remembers.

“I thought she was very superficial and I was not very happy about going and covering her. Actually I changed my opinion because she was so impressive on that trip and she really worked very hard and I saw that she had something that I really saw with Nelson Mandela (another of her interviewees) — a kind of empathy with people terribly ill in hospital. She could bring a smile to people’s faces.”

Another well-known personality she interviewed was the acclaimed writer Paulo Coelho. The Brazilian author of the bestselling The Alchemist was so inspired by Lamb that he ended up writing a book about a female foreign correspondent in Kazakhstan.

“I am used to being somebody that writes for other people and I think I got a taste of my own medicine,” she confesses.

“One day I was in Portugal on holiday and got this e-mail from him with a long attachment and it was this book and it said I want you to read this because you inspired the main character.”

The book is called The Zahir and that was the first time she found out about it.

“I think it is a great advantage being a woman journalist because women are better listeners,” she laughs. Lamb is, in fact, optimistic and encouraging about being a female correspondent reporting from male-dominated societies.

“The great advantage in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan and others is that I can go and speak to women whereas my male colleagues are not able to go and speak to half the population,” she says.

Lamb takes care to dress in accordance with local customs and says she tries to respect different cultures. “I like wearing the salwar kameez — actually, very comfortable — and I think it looks good too,” she says.

She narrates an amusing incident that took place when she was living in Pakistan during the 1980s. She got an opportunity to interview General Zia but later realised her recorder had not picked up anything.

“So I had to phone his military attaché and say there were lots of bits I couldn’t hear. ... I think he realised I hadn’t got anything burnt. Fortunately — the advantage of it being a military regime — they had taped it too, so they sent me their copy.”

Besides being a foreign correspondent, Lamb is also a mother. Last October, when Benazir returned to Pakistan after an eight-year exile, Lamb was with her during the journey from Karachi airport when blasts occurred.

Her husband and son in England were very worried. “That was very difficult,” she says. “My husband told me that Lorenzo [her son] had asked: ‘Do you think mommy survived?’ It is horrible for a mother that you are putting your child in that position — when they are watching something and thinking my mother has been killed. I seriously thought about quitting over that.”

Benazir and Lamb once fell out over critical reporting of Benazir’s government but Lamb managed to keep in touch with the Pakistan prime minister.

On Lamb’s wedding, the former Pakistani prime minister sent her a present.“That was like a peace offering almost and then we became friends again,” she says.

Recently two of Benazir’s friends were in London and they met Lamb. “We went to her apartment in Kensington and to a restaurant where she used to go and where I have had lunch with her. We were all talking about previous times. And that felt very strange — it really hit me that she was dead.”

On the mention of Afghanistan, Lamb’s eyes seem to light up: “I love Afghanistan,” she says. It is as if Afghanistan represents a gateway into another world. “The very proud but hospitable and noble people,” she says.

“The love of beauty and the way you see a soldier with a flower tied around the Kalashnikov. The values they still have that I think is forgotten a lot in the West. Respect for old people. Oral traditions.”

“It is the first place I went to as a foreign correspondent. It is like your first love affair that you always sing quite fondly of,” she says.

June 28, 2008 | 2:13 AM Comments  0 comments
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Arctic Could See First Ice-Free Summer This Year - Experts Worry About a Disturbing Trend at the North Pole
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

The distinct possibility that the North Pole could be free of sea ice -- for the first time in recorded history -- may become a cold reality this summer.

The Arctic's thick, resilient multiyear sea ice (frozen sea surface), which usually accumulates and lasts through the annual melting season, has started to give way to thinner, vulnerable first-year ice.

Satellite data gathered by the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center showed that young sea ice, which is no more than about 60 inches deep and much more susceptible to melting away, now makes up only 72 percent of the Arctic ice sheet. Using that estimate, scientists at the center see a 50 percent chance that ice at the highest point in the Arctic will melt by the summer's end.

Andy Mahoney, a center researcher, has pinpointed this year in particular as having the "greatest chance" of being ice-free.

Such a scenario, however, will depend on the weather during the next couple of months. "It will probably come down to how cloudy it is this summer," Mahoney says. "If there's clear skies and if atmospheric patterns resemble last year's, you're going to see a lot more melt."

Increased rates of Arctic melt have altered the region in unprecedented ways. Arctic sea ice dwindled to a record low in September, clearing a route through the fabled Northwest Passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska. Opening of the path has provided ships a shorter, more direct route between Asia and Europe.

"It's got a shock level for people because there's always ice at the North Pole, but there are also real implications," Mahoney said. "If the North Pole melted out, the shipping industry would be paying very close attention to that."

Wieslaw Maslowski, who conducts Arctic ice research from his base at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., told ABC News last summer that there was a chance that the Arctic's entire ice sheet could vanish for the first time in just four or five years.

Such a statement was considered a daring projection at the time, given that climate prediction models estimated a few years before that it would take at least another 40 or 50 years before such a scenario is likely to occur.

But now, Maslowski says that "whether the Arctic sea ice disappears for the first time this summer or four or eight summers from now may be beside the point."

"The point," he noted, "is that we may well be passing through the sea-ice tipping point now. We'll just have to see what July and August weather have in store for the

The disappearance of Arctic sea ice may mean an even hotter planet, since the region's ice pack helps cool the earth by bouncing the sun's rays back into outer space. This reflective property, known as albedo, also prevents the rays from reaching the ocean, where heat is absorbed.

Less sea ice means more dark open water to absorb the heat, which melts the sea ice even further.

"Losing the ice sheet means losing an important way of cooling down," Mahoney said. "As a result, global warming would accelerate as the ice retreats."

June 28, 2008 | 2:04 AM Comments  0 comments
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Primitive Alien Life May Exist, Stephen Hawking Says
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Alien life may well exist in a primitive form somewhere in our corner of the galaxy, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Monday.


Given the size of the universe, it is unlikely that Earth is the only planet to develop some sort of life, Hawking told an audience at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He added that humanity must embrace space exploration, if only to ensure its long-term survival.


"While there may be primitive life in our region of the galaxy, there don't seem to be any advanced intelligent beings," said Hawking during a lecture as part of a series commemorating NASA's 50th anniversary this year.


The lack of success by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project to discover signals from an alien civilization suggests that none exist within several 100 light-years of Earth, Hawking said, though he offered three theories on the dearth of interplanetary communications.


The probability of primitive life developing on a suitable planet may be extremely low, or it may be high, but aliens intelligent enough to beam signals into space may also be smart enough to build civilization-destroying weapons like nuclear bombs, he said. More likely, he added, is that primitive life is likely to develop, but intelligent life as we know it is exceedingly rare.


"We don't appear to have been visited by aliens," Hawking said, adding that he discounts reports of UFOs. "Why would they only appear to cranks and weirdoes?"


Alien life aside, Hawking said humanity must pursue a long-term effort of space exploration that would span hundreds of years in order to ensure the survival of the species. He likened those opposed to spending money on space science and exploration to those who wrote off Christopher Columbus' trans-Atlantic Ocean voyage in 1492 as a waste of money.


"The discovery of the New World made a profound difference on the old. Just think, we wouldn't have had a Big Mac or KFC," Hawking said.


"Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect," he added. "It will completely change the future of the human race, and maybe determine whether we have any future at all."


Hawking, 66, is a renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist who suffers from the neurological disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He uses a wheelchair, communicates with the aid of a computer, and co-wrote a children's book about science - "George's Secret Key to the Universe" - with his daughter Lucy in the hope of inspiring youth to pursue studies in science and technology.


"We live in a society that is increasingly governed by science and technology," Hawking said. "Yet fewer and fewer people want to go into science."


Sending astronauts back to the moon, establishing a lunar base with a clear target of going on to Mars would do much to restore the public's support for spaceflight, he added.


"If the human race is to continue for another million years we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before," Hawking said.

April 23, 2008 | 6:29 AM Comments  0 comments
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Smallest extrasolar planet discovered: Spanish researchers
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Spanish astronomers Wednesday announced the discovery of the smallest planet discovered to date outside the solar system, located 30 light years from earth.

The planet, "GJ 436T", was detected through a new technique which "will allow us to discover in less than 10 years the first planet resembling earth in terms of mass and orbit," said Ignasi Ribas of Spain's CSIC scientific research institute.

It was discovered by a team led by Ribas through its gravitational pull on other planets already discovered around the same star in the constellation of Leo.

"GJ 436T" has a mass five times the size of Earth, which makes it the smallest extrasolar planet among the roughly 300 identified so far, Ribas said in announcing the discovery.

He said the new planet is uninhabitable due to the distance that separates it from its star, which is far less than that between the earth and the sun.

To sustain life, a planet must have a mass similar to that of earth, liquid water on its surface, an atmosphere and a similar orbital distance from its star as that of the earth from the sun.

Initial calculations by the team indicated that "GJ 436T" rotates in 4.2 earth days and orbits its star every 5.2 days.

April 10, 2008 | 6:42 AM Comments  0 comments
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