I don't wish to sound anticlimactic, especially as China is rejoicing in the accomplishments of its first spacewalk, barely a month after its first Olympics. Rightly so, this should be another defining moment for all Chinese. Even the name 'taikonaut' is now etched alongside 'astronaut' and 'cosmonaut'. Let us not forget, though, that China is playing catch-up. How far behind are we? To be perfectly honest, 43 years. The Soviet cosmonaut, Alexey Leonov, carried out the first spacewalk in March 1965, followed by American Edward White, in June of that year. In our moment of pride, most - if not all - reports in China seem to have forgotten to mention that others have done it before, not even as a footnote. Well, as the saying goes, better late than never.
I am an optimist, who tends to take calculated risks; I have led scores of expeditions on Earth. In space, however, we need to play safer, but without becoming fatalistic or pessimistic.
Mankind's venture into space has not been without tragic mishaps (including some that went unreported or were rumoured to have been hushed up). The first to come to mind is the Apollo 1 disaster; White was the senior pilot. During a prelaunch exercise at Kennedy Space Centre in January 1967, a fire broke out inside the command capsule, killing all three crew. In April that year, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die during a space mission when the Soyuz 1's parachute failed during re-entry.
A sequence of pictures this week showed us how the Shenzhou VII capsule landed in Inner Mongolia. The huge dust cloud rising up on impact, even with a parachute deployed, gave some indication of how violent that last jolt must have been. I felt relieved seeing the smiling faces of the three seated astronauts, waving to the cameras. But they must have felt the impact in their bones. No wonder Nasa chose the ocean as a softer buffer for the return of many of its capsules before the introduction of the space shuttle.
Even as the US space programme moved into the shuttle phase, in 1981, there were other disasters. Most notable is that of the Challenger, in January 1986, in which all seven crew perished. At that time, I ran a relatively small programme in conjunction with Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Using the shuttle's imaging radar, and other remote sensing equipment, I intended to look for ancient archaeological sites along the Silk Road. The Challenger disaster put all future projects on hold, until 1994, with the introduction of a safer shuttle model.
Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate and Caltech physicist, was my weekend neighbour in the Angeles National Forest, where I had my home. His most famous task before his death, in 1988, was serving on the Roger's Commission into the Challenger tragedy. At a session to Congress, Feynman famously demonstrated his theory by putting a small O-ring into ice-cold water to illustrate how the seal would malfunction, which resulted in the explosion during takeoff, barely a minute after launch.
It may be difficult to envisage such a tiny piece of equipment being the culprit, and so detrimental to the supposedly 'seamless' shuttle programme. But human miscalculations occur from time to time.
