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Posted on 01/18/2003 12:59:55 PM PST by yonif
Israel's first astronaut, mission payload specialist Col. Ilan Ramon, is a career fighter pilot who bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, a senior official said.
The attack, in which eight IAF F-16 warplanes obliterated the French-built Osiraq reactor near Baghdad, was a milestone in Israeli aviation history because the planes flew over enemy Arab territory for hours without detection.
The pilots flew in a tightly bunched formation to send off a radar signal like that of a large commercial airliner.
In 1998, an Iraqi defector claimed the Israeli attack spurred Saddam Hussein to speed up plans to build a nuclear bomb.
Meanwhile, with the Columbia space shuttle successfully launched on Thursday, Ramon, 48, will focus on carrying out a series of scientific experiments.
Among the materials taken along are genetically engineered adult stem cell cultures, which will be used for an experiment prepared by scientists from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
It focuses on building new, specialized cells by isolating adult stem cells taken from bone marrow and converting them into bone, cartilage, or tendon cells by introducing specific genes into them.
The experiment will advance the stem cell work of Prof. Dan Gazit of the skeletal biotechnology laboratory at HU's Faculty of Dental Medicine. Gazit and his wife Dr. Sulma Gazit are guests of the US National Aeronautics and Space Agency and witnessed the launch of the space shuttle.
The shuttle crew will examine the influence of weightlessness on the creation of bone cells in space as compared to their development on earth. The findings are likely to have bearing on understanding the mechanisms involved in development of osteoporosis in astronauts and also the molecular influences involved in creating bone cells in space and on earth.
Ramon, a mechanical engineering graduate of Tel Aviv University, will be on board with his fellow astronauts for 16 days.
TAU has scheduled a special mid-mission conference call between university scientists and journalists on Monday to update them on the team's experiments. Among these is the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, which will include five of the seven astronauts on board and a crew in a specially outfitted plane flown in the footsteps of the orbiting space shuttle Columbia while it flies over the Mediterranean Sea. They will simultaneously take measurements and study the effect of dust particles on climate change.
Meanwhile, in a speech delivered by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the Scientific Club of the Association of the Friends of the Weizmann Institute, he said he was pleased to send greetings to Israel's first astronaut.
A few minutes before arriving at the meeting, he had a phone conversation with Ramon, whom he described as "a man busting with national pride."
"Col. Ramon's flight and his mission into space are a source of honor to us all, and his success is yet another step in Israel's integration into the space age. We wish him and the entire crew of the Columbia space shuttle success in their mission and a safe return home," said Sharon. President Moshe Katsav sent a microfiche Bible the size of a credit card to Ramon to take with him on his shuttle mission.
Katsav wished Ramon success and said Ramon will also conduct experiments for Israeli institutions. Ramon's father gave him some family photos to take into space, and a brother gave him a letter to read in orbit.
Israel's own two-decade old space program has been beset by costly failures, most notably the aborted launch of a $50 million spy satellite in 1998.
Greer Fay Cashman contributed to this report.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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When you think about it, if you know anything about flying, they had to fly overlapping wingtips about 1 foot apart, and at a specific altitude and vector, a commerical route, and at the same speed as a commercial airliner, which is much less that the "comfortable" cruising altitude and speed of an F-16. Any change in course would have to be done in that same ultra-tight formation. This type of flying over that distance and time takes precision, talent, and a whole bunch of pure guts.
You have to give it to ground planning as well. At least one of the fighters had to be equipt with a commerial transponder, or a forged equivalent, to fool the ground tracking radar into thinking that the formation was, indeed, a commerical aircraft. Not to mention that any inquiry from ground commercial tracking had to be done in perfect grammer and language of the supposed pilot of the fake 'commerical flight'.
If anybody had a lick of sense they'd make this action into a movie. Hell, I'd pay 10 bucks to see it, and I'd rent the video later. Being a former pilot, small putt-putts only, I'd like to see how they did this! I've often wondered how they pulled off this attack. This small blurb in this article is the first I've heard of this. A-f'ing-mazing!
There's always some little puke out there who wishes he had even one thimble full of the guts of the average Israeli.
There's always some little puke out there who wishes he had even one thimble full of the guts of the average Israeli.
Letting the Israelis get away with the "Liberty" War Crime is as wrong and stupid as pardoning Johnathon Pollard would be. You have to demand respect from your allies as well as your enemies.
So9
Or the time the Soviet Union shot down a commercial airliner?
"We also lost 34 American lives when, on June 8, the fourth day of the war, the U.S. communications ship Liberty came under air and naval attack. We were meeting with President Johnson in the White House situation room, considering the implications had the Soviets or Egyptians attacked the ship, when we received word from Tel Aviv that Israeli forces were responsible. That didn't please us, although an Israeli attack on Liberty was far easier to deal with. But I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous."
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