Astronauts, Cosmonauts & Taikonauts

Been raining here much of the day, and I've been writing about the financial debacle all day, so I'm tired of it. But it will go on tomorrow and so will I.

Question for today: Did Chinese astronaut Zhai Zhigang sing a bit of "The East is Red" during his spacewalk last week, the first ever for the People's Republic? Maybe not. That's an oldies song, after all. Maybe the Chinese need to come up with something new, like "Tainted Exports are Glorious."

The Communist Party is like the Sun,
Wherever it shines, we make some dough.
Wherever there is a Communist Party,
Huzzah, sweatshops make the nation rich!

That doesn't rhyme because insisting that it rhyme would represent interference in the internal affairs of China.

Actually, I've read that Chinese astronauts are sometimes called taikonauts, a hybrid of Chinese and Greek, but does every country have to call its astronauts something different? "Astronaut" and "cosmonaut" were fine back when there were only two space programs, but now we're at risk of many competing terms for the same thing.

There's other space news, too. The Messenger probe will fly by Mercury on October 6, and come back to orbit that inhospitable little planet in 2011. It's always a good thing when such a spaceship passes near a relatively unexplored planet. Coincidentally, I just read the chapter on Mercury in a book called The Planets by Dava Sobel, a fine book (so far) by a woman who not only knows her planetary science, but also the planets' attendant mythologies and the history of their exploration.

A page or so of the Mercury chapter was devoted to the elusive planet Vulcan, postulated to orbit even closer to the Sun than Mercury. I'd read of it before, but only in passing. It was thought in the 19th century that the gravitational presence of Vulcan would explain some oddities in Mercury's motion. These oddities were in fact later explained by non-Newtonian physics, so astronomers looking for Vulcan looked in vain, but at least Star Trek had some use for the name.