China's Ming Dynasty astronaut
Legendary 16th century official was space pioneer
By Joe Havely
CNN
HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- Astronaut Yang Liwei's history-making flight to the stars will almost certainly transform him into an instant hero for millions of Chinese.
His flight aboard the Shenzhou V spacecraft has shown China capable of joining an elite club of space powers that until Wednesday included just Russia and the United state as its members.
Of course, as any space historian knows, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space.
His 1961 flight aboard a Soviet Vostok space capsule catapulted the former air force pilot into the history books and set off alarm bells in the Western world that the final frontier was about to turn a very communist shade of red.
But was he really the first?
Several centuries earlier -- legend says about 1500 AD, around the middle of the Ming Dynasty -- a Chinese stargazer named Wan Hu dreamed of going where no man had gone before and set out to turn that dream into space age reality.
According to the legend, Wan, a local government official, was obsessed by the stars and planned a rather harebrained scheme to get himself closer to them.
Something of a nutty professor character, Wan set out to make himself the world's first astronaut.
Picking up on China's recently developed expertise in rocketry, he took up the task of building himself a space ship.
Centuries before the Wright brothers took to the air or the Germans launched their V1 and V2 rockets, Wan was convinced that the weapons of war could also be a means of transportation and his ticket to the stars.
He was somewhat ahead of his time.
Big bang
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Gagarin: First in space and hero of the Soviet Union... but did someone boldly go before him?
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Wan's pioneering spacecraft was built around a sturdy chair, two kites and 47 of the largest gunpowder-filled rockets he could lay his hands on.
Come the launch day, Wan dressed himself in his imperial finery, strapped himself in the chair and called upon his 47 servants, each armed with a flaming torch, to light the 47 fuses.
Their job done, the servants speedily retreated to a safe distance ... and waited.
What came next, the legend goes, was an enormous bang.
When the smoke eventually cleared, Wan and his chair were nowhere to be seen.
Whether Wan actually made it or not has never been made clear.
The prognosis does seem a little doubtful.
But despite the somewhat cranky nature of spacecraft he was certainly on the right track.
Four-and-a-half centuries later and those same principles behind the first Chinese rockets did indeed lift Gagarin on his historic flight beyond Earth's gravity.
Another four decades on and China finally followed suit, launching a man into space and turning Wan Hu's centuries-old dream into reality.
http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/photogalleries/mingdynasty/mingdynasty_06.html
Mythbusters: Ming Dynasty Astronaut
Ming Dynasty Astronaut
This myth comes from the story of a Ming dynasty (~1500 AD) astrologer who strapped 47 rockets to a chair, lit them off, and vanished in a puff of smoke -- records claim he was launched into space.
To reconstruct the rockets of that time, they found some 3/4" bamboo poles to build 1' rockets. The rockets were filled with homebrewed gunpowder (charcoal/sulfur/saltpeter) mimicking the historical ingredients. The bamboo was also wrapped in twine for strength.
Adam had a lot of trouble cooking up the bamboo. Hoping for as much as 50 pounds of thrust out of each rocket, his first mixture got a grand total of... a half a pound of thrust. Changing the ratios around, there was shot after shot of wimpy rocket firing off. Adam's best only managed 0.77 pounds, so at last they called in rocketeers from the JATO myth for help (who had a mixture that could manage 5 pounds of thurst per rocket).
For the experiment in the Mohav desert, they built two elaborate rocket chair thrones: one to be launched according to myth, one to be launched with more modern rockets (imotors?) that had 50 pounds of thrust each.
The first chair with the 'authentic' rockets pretty much reproduced the myth. There was a big explosion of smoke leaving a void where there was once Buster and throne, except the throne was blown to smithereens and Buster was a smoking heap on the ground, instead of in space (they may need to find him new skin now). The heat from the adjancent rockets was too much and the rockets exploded.
The second chair produced different results. After getting a couple feet of liftoff, the throne flipped over and the rockets proceeded to push Buster into the ground (breaking a leg).
busted
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Best Regards,
Eddy
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