First French woman in space set to go up again.

October 21, 2001 8:32 AM

First French woman in space set to go up again. Can Jerry Lewis be far behind?
posted by MAYORBOB (9 comments total)

Link doesn't work. Were you looking for this, perhaps?

And is the point of this solely to make another lame Jerry Lewis-and-the-French joke? (Full disclosure: studied France, have family ties to France, sick to death of Jerry Lewis/France surrenders jokes. Something new, please.)
posted by mcwetboy at 9:19 AM on October 21, 2001

Yes, after all, let's remember that Americans used to love Benny Hill when he couldn't get a TV slot in his own country.
posted by Summer at 9:40 AM on October 21, 2001

Is this really metafilterworthy?
posted by kfury at 10:12 AM on October 21, 2001

Is this really metafilterworthy?

::: wonders if Matt can make a macro that automatically posts this in every thread, thus saving us all a lot of time and effort :::
posted by rushmc at 10:14 AM on October 21, 2001

Jerry Lewis is a genius, a comic & film legend, and a philanthropist extraordinaire. The only real strikes against him, in my eyes, are that he actually endorsed & was involved in the "Nutty Professor" remakes, which were truly awful movies, and that he seems to think female comedians are not a good idea. That last part is just weird.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the original link regading the space shuttle and an astronaut. (yawn...)

Oh, and France surrendered again.
posted by davidmsc at 11:23 AM on October 21, 2001

i agree! Jerry Lewis + The French = TEH COMEDY GOLD!
posted by jcterminal at 11:37 AM on October 21, 2001

A sobering reality which is setting in is that the US, which has largely been financing not only the US portion of the station but a good portion of Russia's, will not be able to build up the ISS to a 7-member crew. Without a Habitat Module and a crew lifeboat, the ISS will always be limited to a 3-man crew except for the brief periods measured in days, not weeks, when a Soyuz capsule is rotated or a US Orbiter is docked. This severely limits options for the deployment of European and Japanese astronauts, whose flight slots are supposedly being earned by the supply of laboratory modules (Columbus from Europe, Kibo from Japan). With the budget crunch earlier this year as Bush cracked the whip on cost overruns, there was a trial balloon about Italy perhaps building one or both of Hab and CRV, but they've since made it clear there's no money for either.

With a 3-man crew, baseline workflow for ISS maintenance tasks works out to approximately 85% of astronaut workweek. This was one of the problems with Mir, which though smaller, required more maintenance -- probably to the tune of around 150% of a normal workweek for the commander and flight engineer (Mir slot 3 almost always went to a visiting scientist or astronaut who was not expected to do maintenance, since they were generally paying for the Soyuz). Thus the 2-man Russian crew had to work 16-hour days just to keep things from falling apart.

The hope is that ISS will be more manageable, but nevertheless, maintenance requires at least 2.5 people, leaving little room for science. Extending these lifeboat rotation missions to the maximum is about the only way to get any real science done.
posted by dhartung at 11:38 AM on October 21, 2001

European Space Agency astronaut Claudie Haigneré (formerly André-Deshays) is no joke.
posted by Carol Anne at 12:51 PM on October 21, 2001

Was the point of this post to state that the French sending a woman astronaut, a "rheumatologist and expert in neuroscience", into space for a second time is somehow akin to sending a severly aged, never-particularly funny, non-intellectual movie comic into space for a research program?
We shouldn't even HAVE to defend Haignere's qualifications.
This post is a TROLL.
posted by dness2 at 1:19 PM on October 21, 2001