Tag Archives: France

France to be the fourth nation in space

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The credible recent rumours that China is less than a week away from it’s first manned space flight appear to have stimulated some other potential space-faring nations. France and Russia have announced an accord en principle to launch manned Russian Soyuz craft from the ESA launch centre at Kourou in French Guiana. The Soyuz is the now roughly thirty-five year old Russian three-man launch vehicle which China has cloned for its space programme. France will be footing approximately half of the €350 million the ESA has allocated to the programme, making either France or the ESA the world’s fourth space power. Agence France-Presse, via Spaceflight Daily, is reporting that launches could take place as soon as 2006.

With the American space shuttle (also designed roughly 30 years ago) grounded indefinitely and no new money going into the design of manned launch vehicles, the Soyuz is the only manned space vehicle currently in service and appears likely to stay that way

According to French primeminister Jean-Marie Raffarin, “Cela nous donnera une grande base [permettant] ? nos industries spatiales, avec les Russes mais aussi avec les Allemands et les Europ?ens [..] d’avoir acc?s ? l’espace et ? toutes ses richesses dans l’ind?pendance.”

It seems that the Columbia shuttle accident and recent US-EU tensions have forced the ESA to evaluate its options for an independent manned space capability. At present, only the Russian space agency is able to reach the International Space Station. I guess the ESA figured that if China could afford to launch Soyuz capsules, then it’s probably the cheapest option for European manned space travel.

If €350 million will buy you a copy of the Russian manned space programme, can Japan be far behind? Perhaps even Brazil will want to join the game, since it has a really quite well developed unmanned space programme. €350 million isn’t that much money. There are individuals with more in assets than that.

It has become traditional for each space-faring nation to come up with a new word for people who travel in space. Americans are astronauts, Russians are cosmonauts, and Chinese space travelers are taikonauts (from tai4kong1 taikong – Mandarin for “space.”) Will an independent manned EU space programme require a new term? Enquiring minds (well, pedantic lexicographers at any rate) want to know.

My Petit Robert already has a French appellation for space travellers: spationaute. The term is, apparently, in actual use, since googling it gets approximately 2,300 hits. Some of the French press – and even a few anglophone outlets – have used the word to refer to Frenchmen (and women) who have travelled into space on the shuttle and on Russian launches. My Robert dates it to 1962, but doesn’t tell me if it was an Académie Française invention or a spontaneous production of the French media. It also marks it as rare, but that seems to be rapidly changing.

From a lexicographic standpoint, this one-word-per-nation approach is a disaster. I wonder if the other members of the ESA will be demanding their own words for their space travellers. Will Germans taking off from Kourou demand to be refered to as “Raumonauts”? How about the Brits and the Irish? Will they demand separate terminology from the Americans? Or worse, from each other? Will the Irish demand to be known as fanasonauts? Perhaps, in the name of European cooperation, we should all agree on a single term. Euronaut is a distinct possibility. The Latin root vacuus suggest vaconaut, but something tells me that will not fly. Any suggestions?

Libert?, Egalit?, Fraternit?. And, of course, Credibilit

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It might not be the obvious comparison, but Scott’s ponderings about the state of transatlantic breast relations and the state of French feminism made me remember another Franco-analogy that recently crossed my mind: I believe the current relationship between many countries, certainly in Old Europe, and the US of A has a lot in common with the relationship between the Third Estate (aka “the people”) and Louis XVI in the time immediately preceding July 14th 1789, the date usually considered to mark the beginning of the French Revolution. And no, I am not attempting to compliment President Bush for his fashion sense…

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Sturm, Drang and Laetitia Casta’s breasts – or – Why France bashing is a feminist issue

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[Nota Bene: Due to the deeply inane nature of JavaScript, clicking the “continue reading” link may not display images linked to posts. It doesn’t work for me in Mozilla or IE. If you click on the permalink, you will see all the content.]

Reader Christophe Kotowski sends a link to today’s International Herald-Tribune (a.k.a. The New York Times in Paris), in which New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein offers an solution to my earlier confusion about American policy towards France and Germany:

Meet Mr. Germany and Ms. France

It was on display again last week, that old double standard. On camera, Germany’s chancellor got a muscular handshake from America’s president and a meeting that let bygones be bygones. France’s president got the official cold shoulder and columnists’ heated denunciations.

Yet France and Germany had taken the same position on the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq. Both were offering to help train Iraqi security forces, but not to send soldiers. Both argued that only accelerated Iraqi sovereignty and a larger UN role could secure peace.

Apparently, it sounded different in French. Somehow, to American ears, it always does. At this point in strained trans-Atlantic relations, an obvious explanation comes to mind: In the American imagination, France is a woman, and Germany is just another guy.

The French themselves depict La Belle France as a bare-breasted “Marianne” on the barricades. They export high fashion, cosmetics, fine food – delicacies traditionally linked to a woman’s pleasure. And French has always been Hollywood’s language of love.

Germany, meanwhile, is the Fatherland, its spike helmets retooled into the sleek insignia of cars like the Mercedes and the BMW. It also exports heavy machinery and strong beer – products associated with manliness. Notwithstanding Goethe, Schiller and Franka Potente, German is Hollywood’s language of war, barked to the beat of combat boots in half a century of movies.

Such images simply overpower facts that do not fit the picture – like decades of German pacifism and French militarism since World War II. So what if France was fighting in Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere in Africa and deploying a force of 36,000 troops around the world, while Germans held peace vigils and invented Berlin’s Love Parade. For Americans, it seems, World War II permanently inoculated Germans against “the wimp factor” and branded the French indelibly as sissies. […]

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Thank God for government by our betters

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Via Crooked Timber and Mark Kleinman, I’ve just read this utterly stupid column from Forbes:

Europe’s Utopian Hangover

The EU is built on a fantasy–that men and women can do less and less work, have longer and longer holidays and retire at an earlier age, while having their income, in real terms, and their standard of living increase. And this miracle is to be brought about by the enlightened bureaucratic regulation of every aspect of life.

The EU is a French concept and is still largely run according to French ideas. And France is the archetypal EU country. If you have a regular job in France, your life is, in theory, lyrical. You work 35 hours a week. You generally get four weeks of holiday in August, plus a further three weeks throughout the year, in addition to 11 state holidays. Full medical care is provided, even in retirement. Retirement age varies, but it is now typically 55. Pensions may be two-thirds to three-quarters of a person’s salary at the time of retirement. […]

Americans should count their blessings, above all the supreme blessing of having an economy that is run by businessmen not bureaucrats, or that–under wise governance–runs itself.

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The continuing Franco-American mess

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Today’s Le Monde points out the odd dichotomy in American policy towards “Old Europe.” It seems that the US has been playing nice with Germany and giving the French government the cold shoulder.
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Around the Internet

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Polls indicate Estonians will vote yes to EU accession tomorrow.

In Sweden, “polls give widely differing indications as to the likely outcome of the referendum.”

The Economist has a pretty decent primer on our referendum. (Via Crooked Timber)

International Herald Tribune reported yesterday enlargement seems to be bad news for African farmers::

For France the prospect of support from Poland and Hungary is a welcome development.

For years French politicians have feared that the enlargement of the European Union would mean a dilution of French power and influence in Europe. But on the question of farm policy, enlargement could provide much-needed moral and political support.

It is a different story for groups that support a radical overhaul of the E43 billion, or $48 billion, program, for whom enlargement is a worrying prospect.

“The opportunity for reform was this summer,” said Sam Barratt of Oxfam, an aid organization that has been very critical of Europe’s farm policies. “And given the obstinacy that the French had then, when the Hungarians and the Poles join it’s going to make any reform even harder.” The number of farmers in the Union will increase by 50 percent with the admission of 10 new countries into the Union in May.

Blogs:

The indispenable Cosmocrat finds increasingly strong signs that the EU Constitution will be fundamentally re-examined by the Inter-Governmental Conference.

Gary Farber is back!

Stefan Geens blogs about The Wall Street Journal’s comments on Anna Lindh. He was pleasantly surprised, then quite unpleasantly surprised.

Juan Cole on Al-Qaeda’s new geostrategic masterplan