Not for profit website/blog on astronomy, space and my writing
With a population of 1.2 billion people, India has just one national with first hand experience of spaceflight. Rakesh Sharma, a now retired Indian Air Force wing commander in 1984 spent eight days in space aboard the Soviet space station Salyut 7. This account of his spaceflight was recorded at this home in the Nilgris region of India in August 2013.
MP3 audio below and Youtube video below that
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Vikram Sarabhai is unanimously accepted across India as the “father” of its space program. Not really known well outside India, he died suddenly and prematurely at age of 52 in 1971. He had studied cosmic ray physics and gained his PHD from Cambridge in 1947 the same year India became an independent nation. He spent the rest of his life implementing a vision that the prosperity of India and all of its people lay in science. The scientific institutions he built still play key role in India today. Convincing the Indian population that they had the intellectual capacity to rebuild India with their own hands is perhaps his lasting legacy.
The most scholarly biography on his eventful life is Vikram Sarabhai – A life by Amrita Shah. A review of the book is available here. This episode is a recording with Amrita Shah conducted fittingly at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where Vikram Sarabhai studied physics under C V Raman who in 1930 had won the Nobel Prize for physics.
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Like so many in the “space community” I was saddened to hear of the passing of Reg Turnill. He was the BBC’s aerospace correspondent but is best known for covering the American Space program throughout the 60s and 70s that he documents so well in his book Moonlandings: An eye witness account.
He was the BBC’s representative in Moscow at Gagarin’s post flight press conference and told me in episode 41 of his experience when I went to meet him in January 2011.
Reg captures the ambiguity of the brilliant Wernher von Braun who he got to know so well that he called him a friend and yet believed that he was a war criminal and should have been hanged.
In this 30 minute podcast , the first a six minutes is telephone conversation recorded on 3rd November 2011 followed by extracts from his talk at the UK Space Conference 5th July 2011 “The von Braun that I knew”. Reg shares three of his audio interviews with von Braun, the audio quality of the 2nd and 3rd is better than the first.
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The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a global science and engineering project to build a revolutionary new radio telescope with extraordinary scientific ambitions.
With funding from ten nations the building of the SKA will start in 2016 and be fully operational in 2024. It will tackle some of the profoundest questions of cosmology associated with organic molecules, gravitational waves, pulsars orbiting black holes and light from the earliest stars that illuminated the universe. To do this the SKA will require super computers, innovative new power stations and high speed communication links that currently do not exist.
This interview with Professor Michael Kramer was recorded in March 2012 at the National Astronomy Meeting in the University Manchester two months prior to the announcement that the Square Kilometre Array will be built in South Africa along with Australia & New Zealand.
Professor Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany that manages the 100m Effelsberg Radio Telescope is a former associate director at Jodrell Bank and still professor there, talks about the technical, political and economic concerns associated with the SKA project.
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