Ramon bombed Iraqi reactor in '81

The Jerusalem Post ^ | Jan. 17, 2003 | JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

[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.

[rmlew]

I wrote
"Huh? Saving Jews was never a goal of the US in World War 2. Hell, we failed to even bomb the train tracks leading to death camps."

Mach.08 responded
That statement above is typical, condescending blather that honestly, incenses me as a patriotic American who has lost family members in that war. What are you saying in the above statement? Is this more scolding MY country because it mounted a mountainous task, involving all able bodied citizens to snuff out the AXIS powers in order to liberate the WORLD from NAZI OPPRESSION?

You misunderstand me. The liberation of Europe was an admirable goal. It truly was a crusade. However, the impetus was neither to save Jews Gypsies or enslaved Europeans, but to defeat a country that had declared war on us. This is not an aspersion towards the brave American soldiers sailors marines and airmen who died, but a simple historical fact.

You like to play "hopskotch" with your definition of a MONSTER. Hell yes, Oppenheimer was just as big a monster as Hitler, come on now, jeesh,wasn't he the RINGLEADER in the research intended to not only exterminate, but to TOTALLY VAPORIZE millions of civilians???

There are many reasons to condemn Robert Oppenheimer. He was a communist who gave the Soviets the bomb. However, he did not commit an evil act by leading research on nuclear weapons.
He, along with Eistein Teller and others worked on the bomb because teh Nazis were and it was imperative that we beat them to the punch, lest the Nazis win the war.
Furthermore, I would posit that nuclear weapons have saved millions of people. Do you know what the cost of an invasion of Japan would have been to the Japanese? If you extrapolate civilian casualties from the Ryukus campaign to the home islands, we would be dealing with tens of millions.
It then allowed us to help contian the Soviets after the war.