China's Ming Dynasty astronaut

China's Ming Dynasty astronaut
Legendary 16th century official was space pioneer
By Joe Havely
CNN
Wednesday, October 15, 2003 Posted: 3:00 AM EDT (0700 GMT)


http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/0...nhu/index.html

Wan Hu's journey to the stars... at least, that was the plan.


HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- Astronaut Yang Liwei's history-making flight
to the stars will almost certainly transform him into an instant hero
for millions of Chinese.

His flight aboard the Shenzhou V spacecraft has shown China capable of
joining an elite club of space powers that until Wednesday included
just Russia and the United state as its members.

Of course, as any space historian knows, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was
the first man in space.

His 1961 flight aboard a Soviet Vostok space capsule, catapulted the
former air force pilot into the history books and set alarm bells
ringing in the Western world that the final frontier was about to turn
a very communist shade of red.

But was he really the first?

Several centuries earlier -- legend says about 1500 AD, around the
middle of the Ming Dynasty -- a Chinese stargazer named Wan Hu dreamed
of going where no man had gone before and set out to turn that dream
into space age reality.

According to the legend, Wan, a local government official, was
obsessed by the stars and planned a rather harebrained scheme to get
himself closer to them.

Something of a nutty professor character, Wan set out to make himself
the world's first astronaut.

Picking up on China's recently developed expertise in rocketry, he
took up the task of building himself a space ship.

Centuries before the Wright brothers took to the air or the Germans
launched their V1 and V2 rockets, Wan was convinced that the weapons
of war could also be a means of transportation and his ticket to the
stars.

He was somewhat ahead of his time.

Big bang

Gagarin: First in space and hero of the Soviet Union... but did
someone boldly go before him?
Wan's pioneering spacecraft was built around a sturdy chair, two kites
and 47 of the largest gunpowder-filled rockets he could lay his hands
on.

Come the launch day, Wan dressed himself in his imperial finery,
strapped himself in the chair and called upon his 47 servants, each
armed with a flaming torch, to light the 47 fuses.

Their job done, the servants speedily retreated to a safe distance ...
and waited.

What came next, the legend goes, was an enormous bang.

When the smoke eventually cleared, Wan and his chair were nowhere to
be seen.

Whether Wan actually made it or not has never been made clear.

The prognosis does seem a little doubtful.

But despite the somewhat cranky nature of spacecraft he was certainly
on the right track.

Four-and-a-half centuries later and those same principles behind the
first Chinese rockets did indeed lift Gagarin on his historic flight
beyond Earth's gravity.

Another four decades on and China finally followed suit, launching a
man into space and turning Wan Hu's centuries-old dream into reality.

Carlos Santillan wrote:

What came next, the legend goes, was an enormous bang.

When the smoke eventually cleared, Wan and his chair were nowhere to
be seen.

Whether Wan actually made it or not has never been made clear.


"He came in pieces for all mankind."

Pat

Charter Member of the Obliterati, Darwin Award Grand Master, and three time
"Hold My Scepter and Watch This" prize-holder, Wan Go Bang.

Gordon wrote:

Charter Member of the Obliterati, Darwin Award Grand Master, and three time
"Hold My Scepter and Watch This" prize-holder, Wan Go Bang.




A tad too severe sir; he did manage (by fate or insight) to use rockets
in his attempt to reach the heavens; that took over three hundred years
for anyone, East or West, to come up with the correct concept again.

Pat

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 01:07:21 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

A tad too severe sir; he did manage (by fate or insight) to use rockets
in his attempt to reach the heavens; that took over three hundred years
for anyone, East or West, to come up with the correct concept again.

....Yeah, but considering the way his attempt turned out, it doesn't
surprise me that it took three centuries for anyone to dare revive the
notion.


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

OM wrote:

...Yeah, but considering the way his attempt turned out, it doesn't
surprise me that it took three centuries for anyone to dare revive the
notion.




Hey...we don't have to be cruel...we don't have to be cruel...Soyuz 1
wasn't a great success either.
Beats the hell out of geese that migrate to the Moon though, doesn't it?


Pat (frantically attaching bottles of dew to his belt- the cheap version
of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen's Gravity Suspensors; and water-based to boot.)

Pat Flannery wrote:

Pat (frantically attaching bottles of dew to his belt- the cheap version
of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen's Gravity Suspensors; and water-based to boot.)


Pat de Bergerac, I presume?

Pat Flannery writes:

OM wrote:

...Yeah, but considering the way his attempt turned out, it doesn't
surprise me that it took three centuries for anyone to dare revive the
notion.

Hey...we don't have to be cruel...we don't have to be cruel...Soyuz 1 wasn't a
great success either.

"The mission was a success, but the pilot died."

cyrille vanlerberghe wrote:


Pat de Bergerac, I presume?


Wait till you see my rocket-powered grasshopper.

Pat

Chris Jones wrote:

"The mission was a success, but the pilot died."


Every time I hear that, all I will be able to think of is how NASA was
still commenting days after the loss of Columbia on how successful the
STS-107 mission had been right up till that reentry problem; up till
then it had been a textbook mission. There was just that little problem
at the end...

Pat