UTMC

http://news.yahoo.com/iran-successfully ... 15302.html

Reuters on news.yahoo.com wrote:Iran has successfully launched a live monkey into space, the state news agency IRNA said on Monday, touting it as an advance in a missile and space program that has alarmed the West and Israel.

As much as the Iranian regime pisses me off, I admire their retro-approach.
This is obviously a propaganda effort, probably more to placate the population than any actual building of a threat against foreign powers. But to step so far back, to pluck a move straight from the last cold war, that almost has style. But only almost.

Now, don't worry, this does not mean they have mastered the technology for building reentry vehicles for atom bombs.
This thing went 120 km high, and since Iran probably can't go picking space capsules out of the Indian Ocean, it didn't even have any great distance to cover, probably pretty close to straight up and down again. Speed would have been very reasonable, a simple parachute doing most of the work of slowing it down upon "reentry". A missile that can cover any distance, or rather it's warhead, would have to survive much, much greater speeds and hence much, much greater friction upon reentry. Even that isn't particularly complicated for a bunch of competent engineers, blunt-body theory and the chemistry for ablative heat shields are both well publicized and have been done for five decades. The trick for warheads is the opposite of space capsules - don't let it slow down too much, don't let it get too hot, or it'll be easier to detect and perhaps shoot down. Which is why while the Thor missile had a warhead that looked a lot like a space capsule, subsequent generations of missiles had and have warheads that look like a pointy implement or a sugarloaf.
Even if they were trying to test a reentry vehicle with that monkey, lacking information on the footprint of the trajectory of this thing, I doubt it's enough of a test to validate something that could keep a bomb in one piece to hit Israel.

I hope it didn't placate them much. IIRC, their own population pretty much can't stand the guys in charge; the economic sanctions have made life very difficult for them.

+1

And I just remembered - there is a new space race going on in which this is a part. And I don't mean between Iran and North Korea, no, the North Koreans have yet to lob something living into space.
No, the other guys currently working on manned spaceflight are the Copenhaven Suborbitals.
Iran is in the position of the USSR after Gagarin, they managed to get a living creature into space first - but the Danes are building the superior technology that will, I think, have them reach the ultimate goal first, as America made it to the moon while the initially superior Soviets didn't.
The newest space race. Danish spare-time rocket-geeks vs. Iranian mullahs.
I say this a lot, but if you put that in a book...

Sisyphus wrote:I hope it didn't placate them much. IIRC, their own population pretty much can't stand the guys in charge; the economic sanctions have made life very difficult for them.

About 6 years ago I went out for beers with a Persian guy. Quote: "Ahmadinejad? That motherfucker! Listen, you gotta understand, we hate that fuckin' guy! He's our George Bush!"

It put a lot of things in very sharp perspective.

--Jaeger

There's a creature in the sky
got sucked in a hole
now there's a hole in the sky
and the ground's not cold
and if the ground's not cold
everything is gonna burn
we'll all take turns
I'll get mine, too

This whole thing reminds me of this character I used to work with. As a kid he and his buddies would take a pet hamster and stuff him into a model rocket for test flights. They even made a helmet for him out of a ping-pong ball.
He survived about a dozen flights before he made the error of chewing through his parachute in flight.
I forgot where I was going with that but... Well, there you go.

Sisyphus wrote:This whole thing reminds me of this character I used to work with. As a kid he and his buddies would take a pet hamster and stuff him into a model rocket for test flights. They even made a helmet for him out of a ping-pong ball.
He survived about a dozen flights before he made the error of chewing through his parachute in flight.
I forgot where I was going with that but... Well, there you go.

I think the Iranians gained about as much scientific knowledge by launching their monkey as your former co-worker did with the hamster. At least the hamster had a parachute.

Rabbit_Fighter wrote:

Sisyphus wrote:This whole thing reminds me of this character I used to work with. As a kid he and his buddies would take a pet hamster and stuff him into a model rocket for test flights. They even made a helmet for him out of a ping-pong ball.
He survived about a dozen flights before he made the error of chewing through his parachute in flight.
I forgot where I was going with that but... Well, there you go.

I think the Iranians gained about as much scientific knowledge by launching their monkey as your former co-worker did with the hamster. At least the hamster had a parachute.

Forget the parachute, that hamster had much more. Tormented for base amusement, humiliated and put into mortal peril for the cheap thrill of his tormentors, he ended it. He took out the only way open to him, and not just that, no. He foiled his tormentors in doing so, he ruined the latest installment of their torture, ruined it in the most spectacular way he could. He had much more than some damn parachute. He had dignity.

And while Iran and Denmark are just getting off the starting line to put a man in space, the South Korea is quickly following the North Korea with a satellite:

K.J. Kwon and Jethro Mullen on cnn.com wrote:South Korean rocket successfully puts satellite in orbit
South Korea said Wednesday that it had put a satellite in orbit for the first time, giving a lift to its homegrown space industry and matching a feat achieved last month by its hostile neighbor, North Korea.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/30/world ... index.html

With all that going on, who will launch something next? Tracy Island?

As if South Korea needs to scare anybody with rockets. When push comes to shove, nobody will ever step up and back North Korea in a fight, and they could just deliver bombs via trebuchet and save a bunch of money on rocket fuel.

Rabbit_Fighter wrote: they could just deliver bombs via trebuchet and save a bunch of money on rocket fuel.

Ah, but you are betrayed by your own ignorance of the communist ways! They have no money on purpose. Not only can they not save what they don't have, they wouldn't want to!



But seriously, NK is a fucked up place, in just about any respect you can mention. They are slowly starting to open up, inviting in foreign businesses, trying to do the China to get an actual economy and have the usual suspects stay in absolutist power at the same time. One can only hope that things improve for people there and, maybe, the eventually get a bit democratic at all.
However, they need that rocketry and all that saber rattling. Selling communist block missile technology is one of the very few actual export businesses they got, and if the rest of the world wasn't shit scared of them, someone might actually try and do something about the scum who run that place. The scum, they can't be having that. So they build rockets.
You might accuse the rest of the world of playing into their hand, but the problem is, any confrontation with these guys - there's a recipe for a shooting war if there ever was one.

Ahmadinedildo has picked Iran's first Iranonaut (or however they'll abuse the -naut suffix).
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeas ... 73605.html

someone on aljazeera.com wrote:Ahmadinejad wants to be first Iran astronaut

President says he is ready to take the risk of being the first human being sent into space by his country's scientists.

I'm conflicted. I'd hate the idea of this guy scoring a propaganda coup and grabbing the rare honor of leaving the bounds of earth ... the idea of this guy ending in a flaming rocket inferno or burning up upon a messed up reentry, either one of his own making, is sorta appealing.

DerGolgo wrote:the idea of this guy ending in a flaming rocket inferno or burning up upon a messed up reentry, either one of his own making, is sorta appealing.

Won't the twerp become a martyr?

Zim wrote:

DerGolgo wrote:the idea of this guy ending in a flaming rocket inferno or burning up upon a messed up reentry, either one of his own making, is sorta appealing.

Won't the twerp become a martyr?

Like I said, I'm conflicted about it...