Malaysia’s Spaceflight Participant
by david on Oct.04, 2007, under Malaysia, Rants
To those of you who visit aisehman, then you’d have probably seen this already. But on the off chance that you haven’t, I think this just warrants its own post right here on WTF.
The above is a screenshot from NASA’s website. Notice all the other people in the picture are astronauts or cosmonauts but what about Malaysia’s own contribution to this band of spacemen? He’s a ’spaceflight participant’, whatever that means…
The site doesn’t list much about him either…
Nope, no Biography or Interview listed… Yep, we’re gonna contribute ALOT to this mission.
Tango here:
Let me just add that according to Wikipedia, Spaceflight Participant is basically just a glorified space tourist!! How sad that we spent RM30m to send this dude to space just for him to play gasing, do ‘teh tarik’ and fast in space. Imagine how many of the poor can you feed with RM30m.
And the kicker… the dude will most definately get a Datukship upon returning to earth.
October 8th, 2007 on 7:41 am
Frankly, sending someone up into space is completely worthless as both Americans and Russians are too careful with their information to allow much of a “technology transfer”.
We won’t gain any legitimate experience. And if we live in denial, we could probably convince ourselves that we’re ready for space.
But really, it is an exercise in futility. And no, there is no envy involved.
October 9th, 2007 on 3:36 am
I know that a lot of other things could be done with the RM30million. (Actually, the figure varies, some say it’s higher).
But at the risk of sounding like a selfish @$$hole, at the end of the day, we will always have the poor, our roads will always need maintenance, we will always pay toll, our public transportation will never be enough etc.
IF, this space programme was going to benefit us in some way (however small), I’d be all for it even if we could make better use of the money.
But I HONESTLY cannot see ANY purpose in this entire programme, apart from tourism.