You CAN see the Great Wall from space, says Gene Cernan -

The Straits Times - Asia ^ | March 14, 2004 | Felix Soh

[UnklGene]

You CAN see the Great Wall from space, says Gene Cernan - By Felix Soh

HOLD the presses!

Don't change the Chinese elementary school textbooks which say that the Great Wall of China can be seen by the naked eye from outer space.

Moves to amend these textbooks are afoot after the first Chinese in space, Colonel Yang Liwei, commented that he could not see the Great Wall during his historic 14 orbits around the Earth in October last year.

But Col Yang, a veritable space newbie with a mere 21 hours in orbit, is mistaken - you can see the ancient structure from the great beyond.

Confirmation of this comes from a person who knows what he's talking about.

He is veteran American astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, who logged 556 hours in space, of which 75 hours were spent on the lunar surface.

He told The Sunday Times when he was in Singapore recently for the Asian Aerospace 2004 show: 'At Earth orbit of 160km to 320km high, the Great Wall of China is indeed visible to the naked eye.'

Whether the Great Wall can be seen from outer space has long been the subject of contention. The wall snakes thousands of kilometres across northern China.

The subject re-surfaced when taikonaut Yang made his 'no Wall' remark during his space odyssey in the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft.

In response, a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference last week submitted a proposal to the government to amend school books and curricula 'to stop spreading the Great Wall space myth'.

The publisher of a sixth-grade textbook, containing an essay on how the Great Wall and a Dutch sea embankment were visible from space, has been told to remove it.

There is another view. The organisation that runs the US space programme, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said that while many man-made objects can be seen from space without magnification, the Great Wall is not among them.

Nasa said this is because the wall is not wide enough to be detected. It is also made from native materials that blend into the surrounding landscape.

But Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan, who was there in the Great Beyond and belongs to the exclusive club of 12 men who had walked on the moon, knows better.

He has seen the Great Wall from Earth orbit, although he said he couldn't do so while he was on the moon.

'All you can see from the moon are the Earth's continents and oceans but not man-made objects,' he said.

It's all a matter of knowing where to look - and looking hard enough.

He said: 'If you know where to look and you look hard enough, you can also see the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, where I live.'

'Or even Singapore,' he added.

[South40]

Story

[infowarrior]

So, ok, you can see the greatest government boondoggle in the ancient world from space... So?

the infowarrior