Successful China rocket launch, recovery a step forward in its plan to reach Mars

GAZA AEROSPACE -- CHINA has recovered an experimental probe launched aboard a new generation rocket, marking another milestone in its increasingly ambitious space program that envisions a mission to Mars by the end of the decade.

Space program authorities said the spaceship’s landing of the on the vast Inner Mongolian steppe keeps China on schedule to place its second space station into orbit later this year.

The launch of the spaceship aboard the newly developed Long March 7 rocket on Saturday was hailed as a breakthrough in the use of safer, more environmentally friendly fuels. The launch also marked the first use of the massive new Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island province of Hainan.

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China launches new carrier rocket

GAZA AEROSPACE -- China blasted off its Long March-7 new generation carrier rocket on a successful inaugural voyage on Saturday from a new launch centre, state media reported, as the country races ahead with an ambitious space program.

The medium-sized, two-stage rocket is expected to become the main carrier for China’s future space missions.

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Gaza Ambassadors of Mars: Palestinian Mission to Outer Space

GAZA AEROSPACE -- Gaza Ambassadors of Mars: Palestinian Mission to Outer Space

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China announces second lunar probe

China Thursday announced plans for its second lunar probe in October ahead of its launch of an unmanned space module set for next year.

The Chang'e-2 lunar probe in October would be launched on a Long March 3-C carrier rocket, said Liang Xiaohong, party chief of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Liang's announcement came a day after Qi Faren, former chief designer of China's Shenzhou spaceships, announced plans for the launch of the Tiangong-I unmanned space module next year.

Tiangong-1 is designed for the country's first space docking and is seen as an essential step toward building a space station, Xinhua said.

A spokesman for the Chinese space program had said a year ago the unmanned module launch would be launched this year but the report blamed the delay until next year on technical reasons but gave no details.

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04718v first Turkish plane arrived in Jerusalem

Pilots Salim Bey, Kemal Bey in leather coats, Bleriot plane 'Edremit', en route Istanbul-Cairo (first completed flight)...info from the ab-ix forum of Air Britain and the Cedarjet website. (May 1 1914)

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The Palestinian Airlines History Pages

Before its partition and the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, Palestine, under British mandate, with both its Arab and Jewish populations had the most advanced economy, possibly the most educated population, and the highest potential for development in the Middle East.

Airports in Palestine, including Gaza and Lydda were important stops in the prestigious network of Imperial Airways. Palestine Airways, founded in July 1937 by Pinhas Rutenberg, was second only to Egypt's Misrair as the oldest airline in the region and was based in Haifa. It started its operations with flights between Haifa and Lydda using 2 Shorts S.16 Scion 2 planes. As tensions between the Arab and Jewish communities increased in the late thirties, the airline's base was transferred to a new airfield in Tel-Aviv (the airstrip is currently known as Sde Dov Airport) in October 1938. The fleet was increased by a Short S.22 Scion and a De Havilland DH-89 Rapide in 1938. The Rapide performed a twice daily rotation between Tel-Aviv and Haifa, a route expanded to Beirut a few weeks later. Palestine Airways ceased its operations in August 1940 and its aircraft were taken-over by the Royal Air Force during the second world war. Palestine Airways' shares were held by Jewish entrepreneurs, its Hebrew title was "Netivei Avir Eretz Yisrael" (Air Lines of the Land of Israel) while its title in Arabic reads "Turuq Al Jawwiya Bi Filistin" (The Airline Company in Palestine), a discrepancy that was lost in the official translation to English.

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New Russian stealth fighter makes first flight

The "fifth-generation" stealth fighter -- Russia's first all-new warplane since the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged the defense industry into poverty and disarray -- flew for 47 minutes, planemaker Sukhoi said.

"It's a remarkable event," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told his cabinet, but he suggested the plane still needed work.

"There is very much to be done, in part as regards the engine," Putin said. "But the fact that the plane is already in the air is a big step forward."

Russia's main television networks led news programs with reports of the flight and showed footage of the needle-nosed, camouflage-painted plane taking off from a snow-lined airstrip at a Sukhoi factory in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in Russia's Far East.

"The plane performed very well. All our expectations for this first flight were met," Sukhoi spokeswoman Olga Kayukova said on Rossiya 24 television. "The premiere was a success."

Foreign journalists were not invited.

Fifth-generation aircraft are invisible to radar, have advanced flight and weapons control systems and can cruise at supersonic speeds. The new plane is Moscow's answer to the U.S.-built F-22 Raptor stealth fighter -- the world's only fifth-generation fighter yet in service -- which first flew in 1997.

Putin said the plane would first be delivered to the Defense Ministry in 2013 and serial production would start in 2015. Analysts have said it would probably be five to seven years before Russia's military gets to fly the new fighter.

Successful development of the fighter, which Rossiya 24 said has been tentatively dubbed the T-50, is crucial to showing Russia can challenge U.S. technology.

The 1991 Soviet collapse ushered in a cash-strapped time of troubles for Russia's military. Its aircraft makers have been building warplanes based on updated Soviet-era designs.

EMBARRASSING SETBACKS

Defense spending increased in the oil-fueled period of economic growth during the 2000-2008 presidency of Putin, who has encouraged pride in Russia's military might.

The military has continued to suffer embarrassing and sometimes deadly setbacks since the nuclear submarine Kursk sank in 2000, killing all 118 seamen aboard.

Several failed tests of the submarine-launched Bulava (Mace) intercontinental ballistic missile, touted by Putin as able to pierce any air defense, have troubled the Kremlin.

The Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified source as saying the new Russian plane had lowered and raised its landing gear twice during the flight and added that "the American F-35 fifth-generation jet couldn't do that (on its test flight)."

Lieutenant Colonel Marcel de Haas, Russian security researcher at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, was not convinced of the plane's bright future.

"My impression is that this new fighter plane is also more propaganda than a real expectancy," he told Reuters by e-mail.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov told the cabinet more work had to be done on the engine and the armaments system. Neither he nor Putin went into details.

The new plane is important for future Russian arms sales.

In a statement on the company website sukhoi.org, Sukhoi director Mikhail Pogosyan said the company planned to develop its fifth-generation fighter program further with India, its biggest client for existing planes.

Sukhoi is Russia's largest exporter of military planes and accounts for about a quarter of the country's annual arms sales, which reached $7.4 billion last year.

Besides India and China, existing clients for Russia's weapons include U.S. foes such as Iran, Syria and Venezuela, and their purchase of an advanced new fighter could cause concern in the United States and its allies.

The U.S. Congress has banned export sales of the F-22.

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Bedouins and Circassians, Amman 1921

Diplomacy involving Sir Horace Samuel...the polished Bristol Fighter is Lawrence of Arabia (T E Lawrence's )transport, I think, so he must be in the group. This would be the occasion when the boundaries were determined for Palestine, (Trans-)Jordan and the surrounding states following the British takeover of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in 1917-1918

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